
GlassUKSO^ 
BookjFn 1 7 



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oC. V. 






CHARLES JAMES FOX 



THE EARLY HISTORY 



OF 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 



BY 



GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, M.P. 

ArXHOR OF 

"the life and letters of lokd macaulay" 




NEW YORK 
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1880 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTEE I. 

Steplien Fox. — His Career Abroad and at Home. — His Wealth, and the 
Use he made of it. — His Domestic History. — Henry Fox.- — His Mar- 
riage. — His Opi^osition to tlie Marriage Act. — His Style of Speaking. 
— Outbreak of the Seven Years' War. — Fox in the Pay-ofiice, and Pitt 
Master of the Nation. — Accession of George the Third, and Downfall 
of Newcastle and Pitt. — Bute's Unpopularity. — Fox undertakes to 
carry the Peace through Parliament. — The Methods by which he made 
good his Promise. — He Retires from the House of Commons witli the 
Title of Lord Holland. — His Quarrel with Lord Shelburne and with 
Rigby. — Hatred with which Lord Holland was regarded by the 
Country Page 1 

CHAPTER II. 

1749-1768. 

Lord Holland in his own Family. — Birth of Charles James Fox. — His 
Childhood. — Wandsworth. — Eton and Paris. — Dr. Barnard. — TheMusiB 
Etonenses. — Picture at Holland House. — Lady Sarah Lennox. — Fox at 
Oxford. — Tour in Italy. — Fox's Industry and Accomplishments. — His 
Return to England 35 

CHAPTER III. 

London Society at the Time that Fox entered the Great World. — Its 
Narrow Limits and Agreeable Character. — Prevalent Dissipation 
and Frivolity. — The Duke of Grafton. — Rigby. — Lord Weymouth. — 
Lord Sandwich. — Fox in the Inner Circle of Fashion. — Lord March. — 
Brooks's Club. — Gaming. — Extravagance. — Drinking and Gout. — 
George the Third's Temperate and Hardy Habits. — State of Religion 
among the Upper Classes. — Political Life in 17G8. — Sinecures. — Pen- 
sions and Places, English, Irish, and Colonial. — Other Forms of Cor- 
ruption. — The Venality of Parliament. — Low Morality of Public Men, 
and Discontent of the Nation. — Office and Opposition. — Fox's Political 
Teachers 61 



vi CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER lY. 

George the Third. — His Educatiou. — His Assiduity in Public Business. — 
His Theory of Personal Government. — • The King's Friends. — The 
King's Interference in the Details of Parliament and of Elections. — His 
Dislike of the Whigs. — Formation of the Whig Party. — Lord Rocking- 
ham's Administration. — His Dismissal. — Lord Chatham's Government 
and the Successive Changes in its Comjiosition. — General Election of 
1768. — Fox chosen for Midhurst. — His Political Opinions and Preju- 
dices. — He selects his Party and takes his Seat. — Lord Shelburne. — 
Fox as a Young Politician Page 103 

CHAPTER Y. 

1768-1769. 

Fox's Maiden Speech. — Wilkes. — His Early Life. — The North Briton 
and the " Essay on Woman." — Persecution of Wilkes. — His Exile. — 
Churchill. — Return of Wilkes, and his Election for Middlesex. — Dis- 
turbances in London. — Fatal Affray between the Troops and the Peo- 
ple. — Determination of the Court to crush Wilkes. — Conflict between 
the House of Commons and the Middlesex Electors. — Enthusiasm in 
the City on Behalf of Wilkes. — Dingley. — Riot at Brentford. — Weak- 
ness of the Civil Arm.— Colonel Luttrell. — His Cause espoused by the 
Foxes. — Great Debates in Parliament. — Rhetorical Successes of Charles 
Fox. — The King and Wilkes. — Burke on the IMiddlesex Election. — 
Proceedings during the Recess. — Recovery of Lord Chatham. — His 
Reconciliation with the Grenvilles and the Whigs 138 

CHAPTER YI. 
1770. 

The Effect produced upon the Political World by the Reappearance of 
Loi'd Chatham. — His Speech upon the Address. — Camden and Granby 
separate themselves from their Colleagues. — Savile rebukes the House 
of Commons. — Charles Yorke and the Great Seal. — The Duke of Graf- 
ton resigns. — David Hume. — Lord North goes to the Treasury. — 
George the Third, his Ministers and his Policy. — George Greuville on 
Election Petitions and the Civil List. — Chatham denounces the Cor- 
ruption of Parliament. — Symptoms of Popular Discontent. — The City's 
Remonstrance presented to the King and condemned by Parliament. — 
Lnminent Danger of a Collision between the Nation and its Rulers. — 
The Letter to the King. — Horace Walpole on the Situation. — The Per- 
sonal Character of Wilkes, and its Influence upon the History of the 



CONTENTS. vii 

Country. — Wilkes regains bis Liberty. — His Subsequent Career, and 
the Final Solution of the Controversy about the Middlesex Elec- 
tion Page 193 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Favorable Conditions for taking Rank as an Orator under which 
Fox entered Parliament. — His Early Career. — He becomes a Junior 
Lord of the Admiralty. — His Father's Pride and Pleasure. — Lord Hol- 
land's Unpopularity. — The Balances of the Pay-office. — Lord Holland's 
Indulgence towards his Children. — King's Gate. — Charles Fox and 
his Studies. — His Passion for Poetry. — Naples. — Paris. — Intimate Re- 
lations between the Good Society of France and England. — Shojjping 
in Paris. — Intellectual Commerce between the Two Countries. — Feel- 
ings of Fox towards France. — Madame du Deffand. — Fitzpatrick. — 
Mrs. Crewe.— Private Theatricals. — Effect of his Stage Experience on 
Fox's Speaking 245 

CHAPTER VIII. 

1770-1771. 

The Law of Libel. — Great Speech by Charles Fox, and Burke's Reply. — 
Final Solution of the Question. — Contest of Parliament with the Re- 
porters. — Scene in the Lords. — Indignation of the Commons. — Artful 
Conduct of Charles Fox. — Lord George Germaine's Duel. — The 0ns- 
lows. — Their Warfare with the Press. — The King begins to take an In- 
terest in the Controversy.— A Night of Divisions. — John AVheble. — ^In- 
terference of Wilkes. — Miller Arrested, and Discharged by the Guild- 
hall Bench. — Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord 
Mayor and Alderman Oliver. — Rebellion of the King's Friends against 
Lord North. — Fiery Speech of Charles Fox. — Feeling against him in 
the Country. — March of the City upon Westminster. — Violent Conduct 
of the Majority in the House. — Wedderburn's Defection from the Op- 
position. — Popular Excitement outside Parliament.— Fox and North 
Maltreated. — The Lord Mayor and the Alderman Committed to the 
Tower. — Their Imprisonment and Release. — Testimonial to Wilkes. 
— Establishment of the Freedom of RejDorting Debates in Parlia- 
ment 289 

CHAPTER IX. 
1771-1772. 

Fox at this Period a Consistent Defender of the King's System. — The 
Case of New Shoreham. — The Grenville Act. — Quarrel between Fox 



Viii CONTENTS. 

and Wedderburn. — The Duke of Portland and Sir James Lowtlier. — 
The Nullum Tempus Bill. — JMuemon. — Pertinacity of Sir James Low- 
ther. — Sir William Meredith introduces an Amending Bill, -u-hicli is 
opposed, and at length defeated, by Fox. — Fox and Burke. — Fox 
sends a Challenge to an Unknown Adversary. — The Petition of the 
Clergy, and its Fate. — Story of Mr. Lindsey. — The Dissenters' Relief 
Bill. — Priestley and the Early Unitarians. — Courage and Independence 
of Charles Fox Page 348 

CHAPTER X. 

1772-1774. 

The Moral Danger of the Position in which Fox now stood. — He at- 
tacks Lord North on the Church Nullum Tempus Bill, and resigns 
the Admiralty. — The Motives of his Conduct. — Marriages of the Dukes 
of Cumberland and Gloucester. — Anger of the King. — The Royal Mar- 
riage Bill. — The Bill gets through the Lords, is strenuously opposed 
in the Commons, and with difficulty passes into Law. — Strong Feeling 
of Fox on the Question. — His Earnest Efforts against the Measure. — 
His Sentiments with Regard to "Women, and his Eager Care of their 
Rights and Interests in Parliament. — His Private Life. — The Betting- 
book at Brooks's. — Personal Tastes and Habits of Charles Fox. — -His 
Extravagance and Indel5tedness. — Horace Walpole on Fox. — Influence 
and Popularity of the Young Man in the House of Commons. — Fox 
goes to the Treasury. — Lord Clive.— Fox and Johnson. — John Home 
Tooke. — Fox leaves the Ministry, never to return 390 

Index 453 



THE EARLY HISTORY 

OF 

CHAELES JAMES FOX. 



CHAPTER I. 



Steplien Fox. — His Career Abroad and at Home. — His Wealth, and tlie Use 
he made of it. — His Domestic History. — Henry Fox. — His Marriage. — 
His Opposition to the Marriage Act. — His Style of Speaking. — Outbreak 
of the Seven Years' War. — Fox in the Pay-office, and Pitt Master of 
the Nation. — Accession of George the Third, and Downfall of Newcastle 
and Pitt. — Bute's Unpo])ularity. — Fox undertakes to carry the Peace 
through Parliament. — The Methods by which he made good his 
Promise. — He retires from the House of Commons with the Title of 
Lord Holland. — His Quarrel with Lord Shelburne and with Rigby. — 
Hatred with which Lord Holland was regarded by the Country. 

Charles James Fox, our first great statesman of the mod- 
ern school, was closely connected with scenes which lie far 
back in English history. His grandfather, if not the most 
well-graced, was at any rate one of the best-paid, actors on 
the stage of the seventeenth centur}-. Sir Stephen Fox was 
born in 1G27. " The founder of our family," says the third 
Lord Holland, "seems, notwithstanding some little venial en- 
deavors of his posterity to conceal it, to have been of a very 
humble stock ;" and Sir Stephen's biographer and panegyrist, 
writing within a year of his death, has very little to tell which 
can destroy the effect of this frank confession.' As a boy, 

^ It is difficult to overrate tlie value of the " Memorials and Correspond- 
ence of Charles James Fox," which Lord Holland commenced, and Lord 
Russell continued, to edit. But for their labor of love, a biography of 

1 



2 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

Fox is said to have been in the clioir of Salisbury Cathedral ; 
and (what proved more to the purpose with reference to his 
future career) he was well and early grounded in the art of 
book-keeping. At the age of fifteen his " beauty of person 
and towardliness of disposition" recommended him to the 
notice of the Earl of E^orthumberland, High Admiral of Eng- 
land. Tlience he passed into the household of the earl's 
brother, Lord Percy, and had, no doubt, his share in the good 
living for which, even at the height of the Civil War, that 
nobleman's table was famous.' Fox, who was a cavalier as 
soon as he was anything, was employed on the staff in an 
administrative capacity during the campaign which ended at 
Worcester ; and after the battle was over he took an active 
part in assisting the escape of Prince Charles to Normandy. 

The prince passed the next few years at Paris in great 
distress. In 1652 the French Court relieved his more pressing 
necessities by an allowance of six thousand francs a month — 
a pension very much smaller, and less regularly paid, than that 
which, as King of England, he afterwards enjoyed from the 
same quarter. As time went on, it began to be understood 
at the Louvre that Cromwell would be better pleased if the 
royal fugitive could be induced to shift his quarters. Charles 
was made to perceive that he had outstayed his welcome, and 
gladly entered into an ari-angement by w^hich he was enabled 
to leave Paris out of debt, and to settle elsewhere with a fair 
prospect of paying his w^ay if his household could only be 
managed with the requisite economy. At this juncture Clar- 



tlie great Whig would be an ungrateful, if not an impossible, task. The 
" Memoirs of the Life of Sir S. Fox, Kt., from his First Entrance upon the 
Stage of Action under the Lord Piercy till his Decease," were i)ublished 
in the year 1717. With regard to Sir Stephen's extraction, the writer is 
content to say, " As it is not material to enter into the genealogy of the 
family on the side of his father, who was of substance enough to breed 
up his son in a liberal education, so it is altogether needless to ransack 
the Heralds' Office for the origin and descent of his mother." 

* Clarendon tells us of Lord Percy that "though he did not draw the 
good fellows to him by drinking, yet he ate well; which, in the general 
scarcity of that time, drew many votaries to him." 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 3 

endon, as true a friend as prince ever had, did his master the 
inestimable service of persuading liim to put his affairs unre- 
servedly into the hands of Stephen Fox, " a young man bred 
under the severe discipline of the Lord Peircy, very well 
qualified with languages, and all other parts of clerkship, hon- 
esty, and discretion that were necessary for the discharge of 
such a trust." Fox thoroughly answered the expectations of 
his patron. At whichever of the German capitals or Low- 
Country watering-places the prince preferred to fix his mod- 
est court, he never was without the means of living in com- 
fort and respectability, and from that day forth he knew noth- 
ins: more of the lowest humiliations of exile. Fox was the 
first to bring his employer the news of Cromweirs death, 
and to salute him as the real King of Great Britain, " since he 
that had caused him to be only titularly so was no longer to 
be numbered among the living." Yery little else of a definite 
nature is told about him in his biography, and probably very 
little else was known to its author, as may be gathered from 
the fact that, of the hundred and forty-nine pages which the 
book contains, no less than sixty-seven are consumed in an ac- 
count of the state reception which the Dutch authorities gave 
to Charles in 1660, when he was on his way to England to 
receive the crown. 

As soon as the master had his own again, the servant's 
fortunes rose rapidly. Fox was appointed first clerk of the 
Board of Green Cloth, paymaster to two regiments, and, be- 
fore long, paymaster- general of all his Majesty's forces in 
England. Later on in his career he became Master of the 
Horse, and one of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury. 
He was knighted. He obtained the reversion of a rich sine- 
cure. The people of Salisburj^, "for the love they bore to a 
gentleman who did them the honor of owing his birth to 
their neighborhood," chose him as their member, and, when 
he retired from Parliament, transferred their loyalty to his 
son.^ When James acceded to the throne, the royal seduc- 

' Fox showed liis gratitude to the church in whose precinct he was 
educated after a fashion wliich churchmen of our day would hardly ap- 



4 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

tions which prevailed over the faint Protestantism of Sunder- 
land were tried npon Fox ; but he resisted the offer of a 
peerage, and stucli manfully to his religion. Tlie priests in- 
trigued to have him removed from the Commission of the 
Treasury ; but the king, who, with all his faults, understood 
public business as well as any man in the country, insisted on 
keeping Fox and Godolphin as coadjutors and instructors to 
the untrained Roman Catholic courtiers who formed the ma- 
jority of the Board. AVhen the Prince of Orange landed, the 
Bishop of London, whom a very moderate amount of persecu- 
tion had converted from a preacher of non-resistance into a 
recruiting-ofBcer for rebellion, endeavored to tamper with the 
fidelity of Fox ; but the old placeman refused to take part 
against a monarcli " whose and his brothers bread he had so 
plentifully eaten of." Sir Stephen, however, was not a Hyde 
or a Montrose. The best that his biographer can find to say 
for his loyalty is that "he never appeared at his Highness's 
court to make his compliments there till the king had left 
the country." William had no great difiiculty in persuading 
him to take his seat once more at his accustomed boards. 
Thenceforward, whatever changes might occur at the Treas- 
ury, Fox^s name was always on the new Commission. The 
veteran was sorely tried when Montague, who numbered only 
half his years, clambered over his head into the first position 
in the State ; but ere long the storm of faction and jealousy 
liurled Montague from office, and when the sky was clear 
again Sir Stephen still was at his post, unappalled and un- 
scathed. A favorite with twelve successive parliaments and 
with four monarchs, it was not until Anne had mounted the 
throne that he at length retired into private life. 

His places were enormously lucrative, and he was soon roll- 
ing in wealth, "honestly got, and unen vied," says Evelyn; 
"which is next to a miracle." Evelyn himself informs us 
how Sir Stephen contrived to escape the evil eye which or- 

preciate. The cauon wlio preached his funeral sermon tells us that " he 
pewecl the body of the cathedral church at Sarum in a very neat man- 
ner, suitable to the neatness of that church, of which he was in many 
ways a great benefactor." 



Cii.vp. I.] CHARLES JxVMES FOX. 5 

dinarily pursues a self-made man. At the height of his pros- 
perity he continued "ais humble and ready to do a courtesy 
as ever he was." He was honorably mindful of the sonrce 
whence his opulence was mainly derived, and, after twenty 
years at the Pay-office, he bethought him of a magnificent de- 
vice for restoring to the army some part of the fortune which 
he had got b}^ it. He it was who inspired Charles with that 
idea of founding an asylum for disabled soldiers, the credit of 
which is generally ascribed to a less respectable quarter. Sir 
Stephen furnished much more than the first suggestion. He 
fostered the enterprise, through all its stages, with well-judged 
but unstinted supplies of money ; and if his- original inten- 
tions were carried out, his contribution to the building and 
maintenance of Chelsea Hospital can have fallen little short 
of a liundred thousand pounds. 

Sir Stephen's domestic annals were at least as remarkable 
as his public history. Somewhere about 1654, he married the 
sister of the king's surgeon, by whom he had nine children. 
In 1682 he made over the paymastership to his eldest son, 
Charles, who, three years afterwards, at a great political crisis, 
preferred a clear conscience to the emoluments of his place, 
and, by the single act of his life which remains on record, 
proved that he was worthy of giving a name to his nephew.' 
Sir Stephen married his eldest daughter to Lord Cornwallis, 
a nobleman who habitually " lost as much as any one would 
trust him, but was not quite as ready at paying," and whose 
gambling-scrapes sadly ruffled the serenity of one who is de- 

' In 1085 tlie Opposition protested against granting money to James 
the Second until grievances had been redressed. When the division 
was taken, " to the dismay," writes Macaulay, " of the ministers, many 
persons whose votes tlie court had absolutely depended on were seen 
moving towards the door. Among them was Charles Fox, paymaster of 
the forces, and son of Sir Steplien Fox, clerk of the Green Cloth. The 
paymaster had been induced by his friends to absent himself during 
part of the discussion. But his anxiety luid become insupportable. He 
came down to the Speaker's chamber, heard part of the debate, with- 
drew, and, after hesitating for an hour or two between conscience and 
five thousand pounds a year, took a manly resolution and rushed into 
the House just in time to vote." 



6 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

scribed by Grammont, in terms which read oddly as applied 
to any of the name of Fox, as among " the richest and most 
regular men in England." The old gentleman did not fail 
to profit by his dear-bought experience ; and Evelyn gives 
an amusing sketch of the grave and dexterous courtesy with 
which he foiled an attempt, on the part of Lady Sunderland, 
to saddle him with a second high-born and expensive son-in- 
law. His sons were all childless ; and, at the age of seventy- 
six, after his retirement from the Treasury, " unwilling that 
so plentiful an estate should go out of the name, and being of 
a veorete and hale constitution," he took to wife the dauo;hter 
of a Grantham clergyman, who brought him twins within the 
twelvemonth. Two more children were born before Sir 
Stephen's death, which took place at his Chiswick villa in 
the year 1716. He had attended Charles the First on the 
scaffold, and he lived to discuss the execution of Lord Der- 
wentwater. One of his daughters by the first marriage is said 
to have died while a baby. Lady Sarah Napier, the sister of 
his daughter-in-law, survived until the year 1S20; and there 
is no reason to question the tradition that Charles Fox had 
two aunts who died a hundred and seventy years from each 
other. 

Lady Fox outlived her husband only three years. Sir God- 
frey Kneller, in the picture at Holland House, endows her 
with small and pretty features, and hair and comjjlexion as 
dark as her grandson's. A fortnight before her death she 
called her children together, and made them a quaint little 
address which shows that she had already discerned the ten- 
dencies of the family character. " Don't be a fop, don't be a 
rake," she said to her eldest son. " Mind on your name — Ste- 
phen Fox ; that, I hope, will keep you from being Avieked. 
You, Ilarrj^, having a less fortune, won't be subject to so numy 
temptations; but withstand those you have when you grow 
up. Then you'll learn to swear, to rake about, to game, and 
at' last be ruined by those 3'ou unhappily think your friends. 
Love your brother, Stephen ; I charge you all love one anoth- 
er. You have enemies enough ; make not one another so." 
In after-years Henry Fox, the most fiercely hated public man 



CiiAr. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 7 

of his own, or perhaps of any other, generation, may have 
called to mind these affectionate forebodings, which can still 
be read in his own boyish handwriting. 

Stephen became, in conrse of time. Earl of Ilchester, and 
the founder of a house which has steadily grown in prosper- 
ity and general esteem. Henry Fox had a stormy and disso- 
lute youth, and did not turn to serious affairs until he had 
wasted some of his best years and the greater part of his pat- 
rimony. He was thirty when he entered Parliament, and 
thirty-two before he got office, an age at which his son was 
the first man in the House of Commons, Any chance of 
Henry Fox being a Jacobite was effectually extinguished by 
his early distaste for certain doleful ceremonies with which 
the 30th of January was honored in the paternal household. 
His principles, if they could be dignified by such a title, were 
Whig, and he owed his first place to Walpole, whose favor he 
repaid by a fidelity which that statesman seldom experienced, 
and never expected.^ To the end of his life. Fox made Sir 
Robert's quarrels his own. He could not forgive Lord Hard- 
wicke for deserting their common chief, as the great chancel- 
lor in after-years had ample reason to know. "Mr. Fox," 
wrote Bubb Dodington, "had something very frank and 
open about him. If he had any dislike to me, it must be 
from my hating Sir Robert Walpole ; for Fox really loved 
that man." He would have nothing to do with the adminis- 
tration wdiich had profited by his leader's fall; and it was not 
until Pelham became prime-minister, on the recommendation, 
and almost under the auspices, of Walpole, that Fox consent- 
ed to return to public employment as a Commissioner of -the 
Treasury. 

The first exploit by which he attracted the attention of the 
world was not performed in his capacity of an administrator. 
Horace Walpole has left us the description of a ball given in 
the days when his father was still in power ; and it must be 

* A colleague of Sir Robert Waljiole said to him in the House of Com- 
mous, while Winnington was speakiug, " That young dog promised that 
he would always stand by us." " I advise my young men never to use 
' always,' " was the quiet reply. 



8 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

confessed that there are some features in the picture which 
modern London might copy with advantage. " There were 
one hundred and ninety-seven persons at Sir Thomas's, and 
yet nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and 
so separated the old and the young that neither were incon- 
venienced with the other. The ball began at eight. Except 
Lady Ancram, no married woman danced. The beauties were 
tlie Duke of Eichmond's two daughters, and their mother, 
still handsomer than they. The duke sat by his wife all 
night, kissing her hand." It is strange to reflect that this 
pair of lovely girls, and a third sister whose turn to be the 
reigning toast was still in the future, were destined to be the 
mothers of Charles Fox, Sir Charles liapier, and Lord Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald. Forcibly, indeed, does such a thought bring 
it home to the mind that the period of which this book will 
treat was the transition between the old order of things and 
the new. 

A more curious illustration of the sentiments and manners 
of the past could not easily be found than the story of Hen- 
ry Fox's. marriage. Fox lost his heart to Lady Caroline Len- 
nox, and won hers in return. He made a formal application 
for her hand, but the duke and duchess would not hear of 
it ; and Lady Caroline's relatives were already looking around 
for a more eligible suitor, when, early in the month of May, 
1744, the town was convulsed by the intelligence that the 
lovers had settled the matter by a secret wedding, which, in 
those days, was a much less arduous operation than at present. 
The sensation was instant and tremendous. At the opera the 
news ran along the front boxes " exactly like fire in a train of 
gunpowder." It was said at the time that more noise could 
hardly have been made if the Princess Caroline had gone off 
with her dancing-master. All the blood royal was up in arms 
to avenge what was esteemed an outrage upon the memory 
of his sacred Majesty Charles the Second, who, if he had been 
alive to see it, would have been infinitely diverted by the ca- 
tastrophe, and would doubtless have taken his great-grand- 
daughter's part. Sir Charles Ilanbury Williams, who had 
lent his house for the marriage, found that his complicity was 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 9 

like to have cost liim his red ribbon. The father and mother 
of the yonng Lady put off their social engagenaents, and hur- 
ried away to hide their vexation at their country-seat. There 
is something irresistibly comical in the letters of condolence 
which came pouring in upon them at Goodwood. Lord II- 
chester wrote to exculpate himself and his wife from any pre- 
vious knowledge of his brother's designs. Lord Lincoln had 
heard, with the greatest uneasiness, that he and his sister had 
been " falsely and villanously" charged with being concerned 
in so unhappy and imprudent a business. The Duke of Xew- 
eastle buzzed round the court, mumbling and bewailing to 
every peer he met about "this most unfortunate affair," till 
he was unlucky enough to fall into the hands of Lord Carter- 
et.' "I thought," said Carteret, "that our fleet was beaten, 
or that Mons had been betraj^ed to the French. At last it 
came out that Harry Fox was married, which I knew before. 
This man, who is secretary of state, cannot be consoled be- 
cause two people, to neither of whom he is any relation, w^ere 
married without their parents' consent !" The prime-minis- 
ter, w^ho both liked and feared Fox, would have been very 
glad to have left the matter alone, and the more so because 
Miss Pelham stoutly refused to abandon her friend Lady Car- 
oline, and, in the vigorous language which young women then 
allowed themselves to use, declared to any one who denied 
Mr. Fox's claim to be called a gentleman that if Lord Ilches- 
ter had been free to present himself, the duke and duchess 
would both have jumped at the match. She was now, she 

* Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, is the only person of whom 
we bear too little in tlie voluminous memoirs of his time. His flashes of 
jovial common-sense never fail to infuse some human interest into the 
dreary political period which coincided with the ascendency of the Pel- 
hams. Unfortunately he loved his ease better than his country, and was 
only too ready to lounge away his life in the background, "resigned," 
says Mr. Carlyle, " in a big contemptuous way to have had his really con- 
siderable career closed upon him by the smallest of mankind," and known 
in history chiefly for " occasional spurts of strong rugged speech which 
come from him, and a good deal of wine taken into him." Two bottles 
of burgundy were his daily allowance. 



10 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

said, in other people's power, but before long would be her 
own mistress and able to please herself; which meant that 
she was on the eve of being married to Lord Lincoln, who, no 
doubt, soon found occasion to repent that he had been in such 
a hurry to take the wrong side in so interesting a controversy. 
In order to keep on terms with the Duke of Eichmond, Pel- 
ham thought it necessary to speak with grave disapproval of 
his audacious subordinate, and, during at least a twelvemonth, 
continued to address him as " Dear Sir " instead of " Dear 
Harry." But the anger of a minister against a formidable 
member of Parliament is not an enduring or implacable emo- 
tion, and Fox soon discovered that his political future had 
gained a great deal more than it had lost by his having as- 
pired to a duke's daughter. The parents remained obdurate 
from 1744 to 1748 ; but even they melted at last, and, in a 
letter which is extant, announced to their erring daughter 
that the conflict between reason and nature was over, and that 
tenderness had carried the day. The birth of a son, whom 
the duke candidly admits to be an " innocent child," contrib- 
uted not a little to this change of feeling ; and, when Fox had 
for years been secretary at w\ar, a privy-councillor, and the 
readiest speaker in the House of Commons, he was solemnly 
forgiven for having married above his station. 

Charles Fox's mother, if pictures may be trusted (and in 
her day they spoke true), must, at each successive stage of 
life, have possessed in a high degree the charms aj^propriate 
to her years. Hogarth makes her the prettiest and most 
prominent figure in a delicious group of small actors and 
actresses just out of the nursery, who are playing the " Con- 
quest of Mexico" by the fireside for the amusement of the 
Duke of Cumberland ; and her latest portrait, taken when 
her hair was gray, is marked by a tranquil, serious expression, 
which is singularly winning. Fox and Lady Caroline were, 
from first to last, an enviable couple. They lived together 
most happily for more than thirty years, and the wife survived 
the husband not quite so many days. Neither of them ever 
knew content except in the possession, or the immediate ex- 
pectation, of the other's company ; and their correspondence 



Chap. I.J CHARLES JAMES FOX. 11 

continued to be that of lovers nntil their long honeymoon 
was finally over. " Indeed, my dear angel," wrote Fox, twelve 
years after marriage, " you have no I'eason to be peevish with 
me. Ask yourself whether you know an instance of my want 
of confidence in you, or of your want of power with me. 
Upon my word, you do not. I w^rote to you yesterday. I 
rode to town this morning ; found six people in my house ; 
went to court, Parliament, dined late, and am at this moment 
waited for at the Speaker's. What can I more than snatch 
this time to tell j^ou that I am, for me, well, and that I love 
you dearly?" Perfect trust and passionate affection breathe 
through every page of the letters, so close upon each other 
in date, and so ungrudging in length, in which Henry Fox's 
easy, kindly, and humorous words 

"Lie disordered in the paper, just 
As hearty nature speaks them." 

Fox has left on the history of his times a testimony to his 
conjugal regard which is highly characteristic of the man. 
In the reign of George the Second the scandal of the old mar- 
riage laws had come to a head. Those facilities for extempo- 
rizing a wedding, which are not without inconvenience in the 
north of our island, had proved far too lax for the warmer 
and less provident temperament of Englishmen. The vision 
of a broken-down parson ready, without asking questions, to 
marry any man to any woman for a crown and a bottle was 
an ever-present terror to guardians and parents. N^umerous 
w^ere the cases in which boys of rank had become the prey of 
infamous harpies, and girls with money or beauty had found 
that the services of a clergyman were employed as a cloak for 
plunder or seduction. A sham marriage enters into the plot 
of half the novels of that period ; and the fate which in fiction 
poor Olivia Primrose suffered, and the future Lady Grandi- 
son narrowly escaped, became a terrible reality to many of 
their sex. Nor w^ere the miseries entailed by such practices 
confined to a single generation. The succession to property 
was rendered doubtful and insecure ; every day in term-time 
produced hearings in Chancer}', or appeals in the Lords, con- 



12 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

cerning the validity of a marriage wliicli Lad been solemnized 
thirty years before in the back-parlor of a public-honse, or in 
some still more degraded haunt of vice ; and the children 
might be ruined by an act of momentary folly committed 
when the father was a midshipman on leave from Sheerness, 
or a Westminster boy out for a half-holiday. 

In the year 1753, Lord Ilardwicke undertook to remedy 
the evil. He introduced a bill which made effectual provision 
for putting a stop to the Fleet marriages ; but his measure 
was so constructed as to inflict a new injustice upon a section 
of the community which had already endured enough from 
the partiality of our legislature. The chancellor insisted that 
everybody, including Koman Catholics and Dissenters, must 
either be married according to the ritual of the establishment, 
or not be married at all, whatever objections they might en- 
tertain to a service some passages of which cause even the 
most devout pair of Church people to wince when it is read 
over them. The bill got easily through the Lords; but as 
soon as it appeared in the House of Commons it aroused an 
opposition, vigorous, obstinate, and intensely clever, but in 
which it is difficult to discover a single trace of public spirit. 
Little or nothing was said about the grievance of the Noncon- 
formists — a grievance which, in our centurj', it took eight 
sessions to redress. Other grave defects, productive in com- 
ing years of infinite confusion and litigation, were left un- 
noticed by orators who lavished their flowers of rhetoric and 
wit upon prophecies that the bill would check population 
and reduce England to a third-rate power, and that fine ladies 
would never consent to be asked for three Sundays running 
in the parish church. Charles Townshend delighted the 
House, never very critical of a new argument, b}' a pathetic 
appeal on behalf of younger sons, whom Lord Ilardwicke's 
bill would debar from running away with heiresses. Were 
fresh shackles, he asked, to be forged in order that men of 
abilities might be prevented from rising to a level with their 
elder brothers?^ It was on this occasion that Townshend 

' Charles Townshend discovered, in the course of the next year, that 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 13 

first brought into successful play his rare personal advantages. 
His elegant and commanding figure, his vehement yet grace- 
ful action, his clear voice and cheery laugh, the art (said an 
acute observer) with which he disguised everything but his 
vanity, completely carried away with him an audience which 
thenceforward he always had at his command. 

The encounter in which Charles Townshend won his spurs 
was only a preliminary skirmish. " The speeches," says Wal- 
pole, "had hitlierto been flourishes in the air. At last the 
real enemy came forth, Mr. Fox, who neither spared the bill 
nur the author of it ; as, wherever he laid his finger, it was 
not wont to be light." A law which annulled a marriage 
made without consent of parents, and which treated the prin- 
cipals in the transaction as common felons, was, not unnatu- 
rally, resented by the hero of the most famous runaway match 
of the generation. Fired with indignation at what he i-cgard- 
ed as an affront to the romance of his life — a sentiment which 
never died out of his family, for neither Charles Fox nor the 
third Lord Holland could speak of the Marriage Act with pa- 
tience — he stood forth as the champion of oppressed lovers, 
and declared that it was cruel to force upon the country a 
measure which, from the first word to the last, was dictated by 
aristocratic pride and heartlessness. He had high words with 
his own leader on every clause, and almost on every sentence ; 
but, while striking at Pelham, he was really belaboring Lord 
Hardwicke in effigy. "I will speak so loud," he cried, "that 
I will be lieard outside the House;" and heard he was to 
such effect that the lord chancellor's life became a burden to 
him as long as the bill remained in the Commons. Day after 
day tly3 secretary at war made the highest lay dignitary in the 
kingdom a butt for his unsparing ridicule and invective; un- 
til at length a ludicrous simile, applied to his lordship amidst 



the new act did not stand in the way of a younger son who wanted to 
make a great marriage, if only he Avoukl be content with a dowager. He 
proved an excellent husband, though he was rather too fond of amusing 
his company by congratulating his wife on her good-hick with a freedom 
suited ratlier to his century than to ours. 



14 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

roars of laughter, proved too much for the filial and profes- 
sional feelings of Charles Yorke, who, as the son of his father, 
had already a great business in Chancery, and who was begin- 
ning to make his mark in Parliament as a cultured but some- 
what affected speaker. With a sensitiveness of which he was 
one day to give a tragical proof, the young man started to his 
feet, descanted in high-flown terms upon Lord Ilardwicke's 
office and character, and denounced the insolence of his assail- 
ant as " new in Parliament, new in politics, and new in ambi- 
tion."' The secretary at war, in his reply, rang the changes 
on these sententious periods with the pitiless skill of a veteran 
gladiator, and, none the worse for the correction, returned to 
the charge on the third reading, and kept the ear of the 
House for a full hour and a half, while he fought his battles 
over again in a speech of which one fragment fortunately re- 
mains to ns as a sample of the source whence the prince of all 
debaters inherited his unrivalled facility. Fox was insisting 
that the measure was so intolerably rigorous, and at the same 
time so carelessly framed, that the ministers themselves, whom 
the chancellor had told off to be its body-guard, for very shame 
liad been forced to amend it until its own father would fail to 
recognize it ; and with that he flourished a copy of the bill, 
on which the alterations were written in red ink. " How 
bloody it looks !" said the solicitor-general. " Yes," cried Fox ; 
" but thou canst not say I did it. See what a rent the learned 
Casca made ;" and he pointed to a clause wdiich had been al- 
tered by the solicitor- general himself, "Through this the 
well-beloved Brutus stabbed ;" and here he indicated Pelham 
with an emphatic gesture. To a well-disciplined member of 
a modern government there is something grotesque in the re- 
flection that the actors in such a scene were all ranged side by 
side along the same Treasury bench. 

Lord Hardwicke was wise enough to remember that an 
orator whose anger is real cannot safely trust himself to the 
impulse of the moment. Taking his revenge with discretion, 
he read in the House of Lords an elaborate jDhilippic, in 
which he designated his traducer as "a dark and insidious 
genius, the engine of personality and faction." Then, hav- 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 15 

ing rcfeiTcd to some sentences of apology wliicli Fox liad 
had the grace to utter, but ^vhich, it must be allowed, bore a 
very small proportion to the magnitude of the offence, the 
injured chancellor concluded in a style half-way between 
good prose and bad verse, "I despise the invective, and I de- 
spise the retractation. I despise the scurrility, and I despise 
the adulation," The report of this outburst came to Fox 
while he was amusing himself at Yauxhall ; whereupon he 
gathered round him a knot of young members of Parliament 
(a class among wdiom, like his son after him, he was always 
a great authority), and assured them, in his most animated 
language, that if the session had lasted another fortnight 
he would have paid off Lord Hardwicke with interest. In 
his wrath he sought an interview with the king, and began 
to complain of the chancellor ; but his Majesty cut him 
short with the remark that Fox had only himself to blame 
for the quarrel, and that he had given at least as good as 
he liad got. The secretary at war declared to the king, 
on his honor, that there had been nothing factious or un- 
derhand in his behavior, " The moment j^ou give me your 
honor," was the reply, " I believe you ; but I must tell you, 
as I am no liar, that you have been much suspected." Be- 
fore he quitted the royal presence, Fox, utilizing the oppor- 
tunity with an effrontery which Avas all his own, had con- 
trived to extract from his Majesty the promise of a small 
sinecure. 

His conduct on the Marriage Bill did Fox no harm either 
in the cabinet or in the closet. " The king," said the Duke 
of Cumberland to him, " will like you the better for wdiat 
has passed. He thinks you a man, and he knows that none 
of the rest have the spirit of a mouse." He had won the 
respect of his official superiors by showing that, in case of 
need, he could fight for his own hand. The time was ap- 
proaching when, if Fox had had a particle of patriotism or 
disinterestedness in his composition, he might have left be- 
hind him one of the greatest names in English history. In 
March, 1754, Pelham died suddenly, and the inheritance of 
Sir Eobert Walpole was open to any one wdio had the 



16 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

strength to seize and to bold it.' The Duke of K^ewcastle 
succeeded to his brother's place at the Treasury ; but every- 
body was aware that the substance of authority, then as now, 
would rest with the leader of the House of Commons. It 
took Newcastle eighteen mouths to learn this obvious truth. 
Avaricious of power, which he hoarded, but knew not how 
to employ, he selected Sir Thomas Eobinson, a dull diploma- 
tist, ignorant of the very phi-aseology of debate, to speak for 
a government in which Fox was secretary at war and Pitt 
paymaster - general. Sir Thomas soon had reason to wish 
himself safely back in the embassy at Vienna. Acting heart- 
ily in concert, for the first and last time in their lives, his 
terrible subordinates divided between them the easy task of 
making their chief ridiculous. Pitt would crush Sir Thomas 
beneath the weight of his august insolence, and then would 
be rebuked by Fox in an exquisitely humorous strain of 
ironical loyalty ; and their victim dreaded the defence even 
more than the attack. Murray, the attorney-general, whose 
close reasoning and copious and polished diction qualified 
him to hold his own against any single adversary, did not 
venture to face such a combination of talent ; and when Pitt, 
tired of his inglorious sport, began to strike at higher game, 
Newcastle was frightened into acknowledging that something 
must be sacrificed in order to preserve himself from the fate 
of his puppet. In 1755, Fox was invited to join the cabinet, 
into which he had not as yet obtained admission, and was 
asked whether he would consent to act nnder Sir Thomas 
Robinson. " What is acting under him ?" he answered, 
laughing. "If we both rise to speak, I will yield to him. 
If there is a meeting of the council, it will be his paper and 
his pens and his green table." ^ The offer, however, was ac- 

' Peiham died at six in the morning. By eight o'clock Fox had be- 
gun his round of calls upon the deceased minister's possible successors, 
and before noon he had obtained an interview with the bereaved brother. 

= Fox wrote to his wife, in the last fortnight of 1754, " I must tell you 
a compliment of Lord Granville's imagination, and whether I tell you be- 
cause it is pretty or because it flatters me, or both, you may judge. I 
was not present, 'They must,' says he, 'gain Fox, They must not 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. lY 

cepted, and the redoubtable alliance dissolved ; but Fox per- 
manently suffered in reputation by this breach of faith tow- 
ards his great rival, whose honor the nation had already be- 
gun to identify with its own. 

The world wondered that so grasping a man should have 
given himself away for so little; but Fox had judged the 
situation with a discerning eye. Before the year liad ended, 
he was secretary of state and leader of the House of Com- 
mons. And now began a duel of giants, which lasted, with 
varying fortune, over the space of three sessions and through 
four changes of government. The antagonists were not ill- 
matched. Fox, miattractive in person and with defective 
elocution, surpassed, all the orators of his time in the force, 
the abundance, and the justness of the proofs and illustra- 
tions with which he supported and explained his views. His 
homely yet pointed and vehement method of debate was 
admirably suited to the taste of hearers who disliked set 
speeches, and no longer relished the similes, metaphors, and 
historical parallels which formerly were in vogue, and in 
whose minds the increasing study of pamphlets and news- 
papers had begun to create a demand for practical aiguments 
founded upon tlie solid facts of the case. Fox was the sworn 
enemy of lawyers who had seats in Parliament. " He loved 
disputing as much as they do," wrote Horace Walpole ; " but 
he loved sense, which they make a trade of perplexing." It 
was well said that Fox always spoke to tlie question, and 
Pitt to the passion ; and in ordinary times an orator who 
speaks to the question is master of the field. But the time, 
far from being ordinary, was pregnant with events so mo- 
mentous that it would be difficult to find words which could 
describe them, or rhetoric which could exaggerate them. 
Problems had long been ripe for solution which concerned 
not only the British kingdom, but all the civilized, and al- 
most the whole of the inhabited, world. Whether France 
or Eno-land was to rule in India ; whether the French man- 



think it keeps him uuder in the House of Commons. They cannot keep 
him under. Mix liquors together, and the spirit will be uj)permost.' " 

2 



18 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

ners, language, and institutions, or the English, were to pre- 
vail over the immense continent of North America ; whether 
Germany was to have a national existence ; whether Spain 
was to monopolize the commerce of the tropics ; who was 
to command the ocean ; who was to be dominant in the isl- 
ands of the Caribbean Sea ; what power was to possess the 
choice stands for business in the great market of the globe : 
these were only some among the issues which had to be de- 
cided during the period when Fox and Pitt were in the 
prime of tlieir vigor and at the summit of their fame. 

On the ISth of May, 1756, the unofficial hostilities between 
France and England, which had been smouldering or blazing 
for the space of four years on the shores of the Carnatic, 
and along the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, and the 
Mississippi, were sanctioned and extended by an open dec- 
laration of war — ^a war destined to be the most profitable 
and the most glorious that this country ever waged. As is 
usual, however, with our glorious w\ars, the earlier operations 
brought us nothing but disaster and disgrace. Byng's un- 
happy blunder, and the loss of Minorca, whicli was to our 
ancestors what Malta is to us, had given rise to an uneasy 
feeling that our navy was not to be relied on. For the first 
time since the Dutch were in the Medway, that humiliating 
misgiving took firm hold of the public imagination ; and, as 
an inevitable consequence, came the terrors of a possible in- 
vasion. The English people were in that state of fury and 
suspicion which no rulers dare face except such as are ren- 
dered fearless by the consciousness of integrity, and the de- 
termination to do their duty for duty's sake.' The whole 
herd of aristocratic jobbers and political adventurers were 
eager to throw upon each other the responsibility of defend- 
ing the nation over whose plunder, in quiet years, they were 
never weary of squabbling. Scared by the first mutter of 
the storm, Newcastle ran whimpering to Granville, and 

* When the invasion was first talked of, the Duke of Cumberland was told 
that the people wished to see him at the head of the army. " I do not be- 
lieve," was his fine answer, " that the command will be oflcred to me, but 
when no wise man would accept it and no honest man would refuse it." 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 19 

bco;ged him to accept the Treasury. " I thought," said Gran- 
ville, " I had cured you of such offers. I will be hanged a 
little before I take your place, rather than a little after." Fox 
carried his woes to the same quarter, and, forgetful for a mo- 
ment that he was talking to the shrewdest observer within a 
mile of St. James's, set down his pusillanimity to the score 
of his unambitious temper. "Fox," said Lord Granville, "I 
don't love to have you say things that will not be believed. 
If you was of my age, very well. I have put on my night- 
cap, but you should be ambitious. I w^ant td instil a nobler 
ambition into you ; to make you knock the heads of the 
kings of Europe together, and jumble something out of it 
that may be of service to the country." But there was no 
chord in Fox's nature which responded to such exhortations, 
and, at a crisis when the English secretary of state might 
have been more powerful than the King of France and as 
celebrated as Frederic of Prussia, he could think of no bolder 
course than to resign the seals. The largest bribes that even 
Newcastle had ever offered were pressed upon Murray, and 
pressed in vain, if only he would consent to stand during a 
single session, or at least during a single debate, between an 
incapable government and an angry nation wdiich had Pitt 
for its champion. But Murray knew better than his tempter 
how irresistible were the thunderbolts of the Great Common- 
er at a time when the political atmosphere was in so peril- 
ous a condition of electricity. In the calm of the House of 
Lords, and amidst the congenial labors of the King's Bench, 
he waited with patient dignity till the opportunity came 
when he could repay tiie Earl of Chatham something of what 
he had endured at the hands of "William Pitt. 

The story of the long political crisis which agitated Down- 
ing Street during the first twelvemonth of the Seven Years' 
War is not edifying or pleasant reading. " The hour," 
wrote Carlyle, " is great ; and the honorable gentlemen, I 
must say, are small ;" but they had among them one who 
was equal to the hour. " Your country," said Frederic to 
our envoy at Berlin, " has been long in labor, and has suf- 
fered much ; but at last she has produced a man." Pitt had 



20 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

unbounded confidence in liimself, and, most fortunately for 
England, Lis oratory was peculiarly adapted to the purpose 
of communicating that confidence to others. " Pitt spoke to 
raise himself," said one who did not altogether love him ; and 
certainly his elevated and audacious eloquence inspired all 
who heard him with a conviction that he was endowed with 
rare courage and decision at a season when rare courage and 
decision in high quarters were worth twenty millions a yea'r 
to the nation. That close connection between energy of 
speech and vigor of action, which is much more common than 
the enemies of popular government are Avilling to suppose, 
found in him its most splendid exemplification. "Without a 
moment of hesitation, without a twinge of diffidence, he set 
himself at the head of his countrymen ; and they, placing 
their blood and treasure at his disposal, believing all that he 
asserted, paying all that he demanded, undertaking every- 
thing that he advised, followed him through an unbroken 
course of effort and victory with an enterprise and a resolu- 
tion worthy of his own. The nation which lately had been 
in a panic because a score of French battalions were quar- 
tered between Brest and Dunkirk, was soon paramount in 
every corner of the world into which a British keel could 
float or a British cannon could be dragged. " I shall burn all 
my Greek and Latin books," said Horace Walpole, who had 
in him more of the patriot than it was his humor to admit. 
"They are histories of little people. The Komans never 
conquered the world till they had conquered three parts of 
it, and were three hundred years about it. We subdue the 
globe in three campaigns ; and a globe, let me tell you, as 
big again as it was in their days." " You would not know 
your country again," he writes to Sir Horace Mann at Flor- 
ence. "You left it a private little island, living upon its 
means. You would find it the capital of the world ; St. James's 
Street crowded with nabobs and American chiefs, and Mr. 
Pitt attended in his Sabine farm by Eastern monarchs, wait- 
ing till the gout has gone out of his foot for an audience. I 
shall be in town to-morrow, and perhaps able to wrap up and 
send you half a dozen French standards in my postscript." 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 21 

While the renown of the great Englishman was spread over 
three continents by a series of triumphs vast, rapid, and dur- 
able beyond any which are related in the pages of Curtius or 
Livy, at home his empire was unbounded, and even undis- 
puted. During four whole sessions his opponents never vent- 
ured to test the opinion of Parliament by calling for a vote. 
Politics, said Walpole. seemed to have gone into winter-quar- 
ters. Charges of inconsistency, of recklessness, of profusion, 
were disdainfully cast aside, and ere long ceased to be uttered. 
A flash of his eye, a wave of his hand, a contemptuous shrug 
of his shoulders, were an adequate reply to speeches an hour 
long, bristling with figures and quotations. When he thought 
fit to break silence, every phrase had the weight of a despot's 
edict. One fiery sentence carried the Prussian subsidy. An- 
other made the House of Commons forget, in its exultation 
at hearing how America was to be conquered in Germany, 
that almost on that day year it had been cheering Pitt while 
he declaimed against the folly of a Hanoverian war. Parlia- 
ment w^as willing to remember only what he chose ; and the 
few orators from whom he had anything to fear found excel- 
lent reasons for allowing his statements to jDass uncriticised. 
A minister who wanted nothing for his own share except the 
honor of serving his country had ample means of providing 
every mouth with the sop which it loved the best. Fox be- 
came paymaster of the forces. Murray, in his own province 
as high-minded and public-spirited as the secretary of state 
himself, was already absorbed in his thirty years' labor of ad- 
justing the ancient common -law of England to the multi- 
farious needs of modern society. To the Duke of Newcastle 
had been allotted the uncontrolled patronage of every office 
in the kingdom which did not affect the conduct of the war. 
As long as Pitt might aj^point whom he liked to command ex- 
peditions, to defend fortresses, and to represent Great Britain 
in the belligerent courts, the whole army of placemen, from 
tellers of the Exchequer to tide-waiters, were welcome to carry 
their hopes and their homage to the old intriguer, w^ho could 
not endure that any one besides himself should be the dictator 
of the backstairs and the antechamber. The Great Common- 



22 THE EARLY IIISTOEY OF [Chap. I. 

er might work his will upon France and Austria without a 
whisper of interference, while Newcastle was making parti- 
sans, while Mansfield was making law, and while Fox was 
making money. 

Fie made money to his heart's content. Pitt, when at the 
Pay-office, had magnanimously refused to follow the exam- 
ple of his predecessors and enrich himself by trading with 
the national funds which were in his custody ; but Henry Fox 
was not the man to forego his legal privileges from any quix- 
otic notions of principle or nicety. It was enough for him if 
he kept on the safe side of a parliamentary impeachment. 
The years during which he had been secretary at war were 
long remembered by army agents and contractors as a golden 
age of peculation ; and he now saw before him a prospect of 
secure and almost boundless gain. He was in a position to 
take full advantage of the favorable condition of the money- 
market. Half the brokers in Lombard Street were discount- 
ing bills at a war rate of interest with cash supplied to them 
out of the public balances, at a time when those balances had 
been swollen to an unprecedented amount by the loans and 
taxes that went to feed a contest which embraced the world. 
Every new regiment that was mustered ; every fresh ship that 
was in commission ; every additional ally who applied for a 
subsidy ; every captured province or colony which had to be 
provided with a staff of salaried administrators, brought grist 
to the mill of the paymaster. Intent upon heaping up a co- 
lossal fortune, which his sons were to dissipate even more 
quickly than he had amassed it, he tamely consented to aban- 
don everything which makes ambition honorable and self- 
seeking respectable. He sank from a cabinet minister into 
an underling, and from the spokesman of a government into 
the mute occupant of a remote corner of the Treasur}^ bench. 
Eich and inglorious, he played Crassus to his rival's Csesar, 
until an unexpected turn in politics tempted liim to quit that 
comfortable obscurity from which it would have been well 
for his memory if he had never emerged.' 

' The extent of Lord Hollaucrs gains may be estimated by a compari- 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 23 

The death of George the Second was the signal for a trans- 
formation of the government as complete, if not as sudden, as 
any which could have occurred at Constantinople or St. Peters- 
burg. The strong narrow mind of the young monarch, which 
soon learned to work in its own direction, as long as it con- 
tinned to work at all, was first set in motion by the external 
influence of a favorite. Lord Bute, the groom of the stole, 
who stood highest in the graces both of the princess royal 
and her son, regarded Pitt as aspiring mediocrity will always 
regard born greatness, and had taught his royal pupil to dis- 
like and distrust the noblest subject that King of England 
ever had. The invincible loyalty of the secretary of state 
kept him at his post for a year after his authority had begun 
to decline ; but in October, 1T61, Bute enjoyed the satisfaction 
of being congratulated on the fall of the eminent man whom 
he had the impertinence to env3^ Lord Melcombe, the un- 
savory associations of whose career are more readily recalled 
by his earlier designation of Bubb Dodington, had been 
tempted forth by the genial sunshine of the new reign to flut- 
ter feebly for a short season around his ancient haunts. " I 
sincerely wish your lordship joy," he writes in a letter which 
is among the gems of the Bute correspondence, " of being de- 
livered of a most impracticable colleague, his Majesty of a 
most imperious servant, and the country of a most dangerous 
minister. I am told that the people are sullen about it." It 



son between his financial position when he took the Pay-office and when 
he quitted it. In the will which he made in middle life he left eight 
thousand pounds, and eleven hundred a year to his wife. At his death, 
in 1774, he left Lady Holland two thousand a year, Holland House, and 
government securities to the amount, it is said, of a hundred aud twenty 
thousand pounds. To Stephen Fox he had already given between four 
and five thousand a year in land. To Charles he bequeathed the prop- 
erty in Kent, and nine hundred a year ; to his son Henry an estate in the 
North, and five hundred a year; while the young men got among them 
fifty thousand i)ounds in money, and a sinecure valued at twenty-three 
hundred a year. It must be remembered that Lord Holland had already 
paid for the two eldest at least a couple of hundred thousand pounds of 
debts. 



24 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

was Pitt's misfortune that his extraordinary achievements 
were accomplished at a period when the poetry of our nation 
was at its lowest ebb. The pen of Churchill, who was his 
sincere admirer, was never potent except when dipped in gall;' 
and to be sung by the Whiteheads was a more serious calam- 
ity than to be libelled by Wilkes. In default of the praise of 
writers whose praise was worth having, it was something to 
be made the object of Bubb Dodington's abuse. JSTo direct 
panegyric could tell more in Pitt's favor than the ill-will with 
which the most notorious of court sycophants and Treasury 
leeches honored the minister who had long been the bane of 
all his tribe. 

In the course of the ensuing summer, Newcastle was bullied 
into resigning the Treasury, and Bute became prime-minister. 
The first act of his administration was to put an end to hos- 
tilities. On the third of J^overaber, 1762, the Duke of Bed- 
ford and the Due de Nivernois signed the preliminaries of 
peace at Fontainebleau. The conditions were not those which 
England had a right to demand as the outcome of such a war ; 
but if Bute had been allowed his own way in the cabinet, she 
would have had even less cause to look back with compla- 
cency upon her long roll of sacrifices and successes. Our peo- 
ple already detested the prime-minister as a Scotchman who 
rode rough-shod over Englishmen, and as an upstart who had 
displaced his betters ; ^ and they were now excited to fury by 
the belief that he had made use of a position which he never 
could have won in fair political fight to barter away the good 



* It is pitiable to compare Avith the native vigor of Churcliill's attacks 
upon the Earl of Sandwich and Lord Holland the bathos which degrades 
his attempt to exalt Cliatham : 

" Though scandal would our patriot's name impeach, 
And rails at virtue wdiich she cannot reach, 
What honest man but would wdtli joy submit 
To bleed with Cato and retire with Pitt ?" 
" Bute became prime-minister at the end of May. On the twentieth of 
June Walpole writes, "The new administration begins tempestuously. 
My father was not more abused after twenty years than Lord Bute is in 
twenty days." 



CuAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 25 

faith of the nation. They had been proud of their share 
in the Continental war. It was largely due to them that 
Frederic had been able to make head against the gigantic 
coalition which threatened his destruction, and they keenly 
felt the disgrace of having deserted him before the close of 
his immortal struggle. It was said that this minion from 
north of Tweed, not content with supplanting the greatest of 
English statesmen, had betrayed a foreign ruler whose alliance 
was an honor to the whole community. The public resent- 
ment was sharpened by a report that the prime-minister en- 
tertained a grudge against Frederic on the score of an epi- 
gram which, in his character of an indiscreet man of letters, 
that monarch had levelled against the Scotch — a rumor not 
very credible with regard to the friend and brother-soldier of 
the Keiths. So odious was the peace that Bute's conduct was 
generally attributed to the basest of all motives. A notion 
that his pockets were full of louis-d'ors was current, not only 
with the populace, but among men of sense and position who 
ought to have taken the trouble to make themselves better in- 
formed ; and the vulgar suspicion was carried to such a pitch 
that an imputation of corruption was extended to the Duke 
of Bedford, who, if it had come to bribing, might, without 
sensibly feeling the loss, have bought up out of his private 
fortune the French plenipotentiary, with Madame Pompadour 
to boot. 

False or true, the charges had to be met, and an approval of 
the preliminaries extorted from Parliament. Bute had noth- 
ing to fear from the House of Lords ; but the House of Com- 
mons, ill as it represented the nation, was drawn from the 
classes who create and share public opinion, and was accessi- 
ble to the spell of Pitt's genius. The time had come for 
employing every species of influence, honorable, questionable, 
and discreditable, which the government had in store. Money 
and intimidation might carry tlie day, if only the cabinet 
could secure the services of a skilful speaker. It was essen- 
tial for success that a case should be made out plausible enough 
to afford members a pretext for voting against the wishes and 
convictions of the nation. The emergency demanded a leader 



26 THE Ez^RLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

of undaunted courage and long parliamentary experience, "with 
a tongue in his head, and without a scruple in his conscience. 
Such a man was not easily to be found. Sir Francis Dash- 
wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was as poor a creat- 
ure as ever held high office, with nothing to recommend him 
except the reputation for cleverness which usually attaches to 
a libertine ; Charles Townshend had upon him the curse of 
Reuben ; ' and George Grenville was too little of an orator 
for one part of the work which had to be done, and not enough 
of a reprobate for the other. The king measured the situa- 
tion accurately. "We must call in bad men," he said, "to 
govern bad men," and, in his despair, he turned to Fox. The 
paymaster, who had got everything that he wanted except a 
peerage, and who hated the long hours of the House of Com- 
mons, was very unwilling to incur trouble and unpopularity 
in defence of a minister whom he would have seen on his 
way to Tower Hill with the most perfect indifference. But a 
statesman in the long run must yield to royal solicitations, 
if he can give no better ground for resisting than his own 
laziness and satiety.^ Fox entered the cabinet, and assured 
the king that Parliament should approve the peace by as 
large a majority as his Majesty could possibly desire. 

' In a very curious paper addressed to Lord Bute, dated March, 1763, 
Fox writes, " I have said nothing of Charles Townshend. He must be 
left to that worst enemy, himself; care only being taken that no agreea- 
bleness, no wit, no zealous and clever behavior, ever betray you into trust- 
ing him for half an hour." Sir Francis Dashwood is justly described by 
Wilkes as one who, "from puzzling all his life at tavern bills, was called 
by Lord Bute to administer the finances of a kingdom above one hundred 
millions in debt." 

" "I cannot be minister," so Fox wrote in the year 1756, "without be- 
ing the prime-minister. I am not capable of it. Richelieu, were he 
alive, could not guide the councils of a nation, if he could not, from No- 
vember to April, have above two hours in four-and-tw^enty to think of 
anything but the House of Commons." That Fox was far from eager to 
undertake the lead in 1763 is incontestably shown by Lord Edmund 
Fitzmaurice in his " Life of Lord Shelburne " — a work which has done 
much to clear uji the disputed points and to vivify the lay figures of po- 
litical history. In volume ii., page 180, there is the prettiest story that 
ever was told. 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 27 

There was no time to be lost. The new leader was hardly 
in his saddle by the beginning of November, and it was nec- 
essary that the victory shonld be secured before the House 
adjourned for the Christmas holidays. Fox possessed all the 
qualities which could command success in such an undertak- 
ing — perverted ability, impudence, cynicism, misdirected cour- 
age, an unequalled knowledge of all that was worst in human 
nature and least admirable in human affairs. No cupidity was 
left nntempted, no fear or foible unplayed on, no stone un- 
turned beneath which one of the creeping things of politics 
might chance to be lying. Every office-holder in Parliament 
was given to understand that his place depended upon his 
vote ; and every office-seeker got a promise that, when the 
battle was won, he should have his share in the spoils, and. 
should step into some post of dignity and emolument from 
which an honester man than himself had been expelled. Mon- 
ey flowed like water ; and any honorable gentleman who was 
too proud to pocket a bank-note had almost unlimited choice 
as to the form of bargain under which he preferred to sell 
himself. The terms of one, at least, among these negotiations 
still remain on paper. Fox appears to have evinced his re- 
spect for the memory of Sir Kobert Walpole by expending a 
quite exceptional amount of delicacy over the business of 
buying his old leader's grandson. Approaching Lord Orford 
through his uncle Horace, he offered him the rangership of 
the London parks, which he estimated at more than two thou- 
sand pounds a year. " Such an income," he wrote, " might, if 
not prevent, at least procrastinate your nephew's ruin. I find 
nobody knows his lordship's thoughts on the present state of 
politics. Now, are you willing, f\nd are you the proper person, 
to tell Lord Orford that I will do my best to procure this em- 
ployment for him if I can soon learn that he desires it? If he 
does choose it, I doubt not of his and his friend Boone's hearty 
assistance ; and I believe I shall see you, too, much of tener in 
the House of Commons. This is offering you a bribe, but 'tis 
such a one as one honest good-natured man may without of- 
fence offer to another." It may well be imagined that a search 
among the archives of our old country-seats might bring to 



28 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

light a curious collection of documents, signed " Ilenrj Fox," 
and dated in ISTovember, 1762, when it is recollected that the 
letter quoted above was addressed to one who, in spite of cer- 
tain faults of character, was known far and wide as a man of 
strict honor and a most independent politician. 

Wlien Parliament met, it was at once evident that Fox had 
got value for his money. A motion for delay was defeated 
by two hundred and thirteen votes to seventy-four, and an 
address approving the peace was carried by three hundred and 
nineteen votes to sixty-five. Tlie fight was over, and the 
butchery began. Every one who belonged to the beaten 
party was sacrificed without mercy, with all his kindred and 
dependents; and those public oflicers who were unlucky 
enough to have no political connections fared as ill as the 
civil population of a district which is the seat of war between 
two contending armies. Clerks, messengers, excisemen, coast- 
guardsmen, and pensioners were mined by shoals because they 
had no vote for a member of Parliament, or because they had 
supported a member who had opposed the peace. An inqui- 
sition was held into the antecedents of every man, woman, or 
child who subsisted on public money ; and it was said that a 
noted political lady, ambitious of emulating the exploits of 
Fulvia in the second triumvirate, had volunteered to bring 
her feminine acuteness to the aid of the committee of pro- 
scription. The old servants and poor relations of peers who 
tad refused to abandon Pitt were hunted frona their employ- 
ments, and thrown back on the world without regard to age 
or sex or merit. But, to do the ministers justice, they had 
no respect of persons. They struck high and low with un- 
flinching impartiality. E"o class fared worse than the Whig 
magnates to whom and to whose fathers George the Third 
owed his throne. Forgetting, what even the despots of Web- 
ster's ghastly dramas remembered, that 

" Princes give rewards with tlieir own hands, 
But death and punishment by the hands of others," 

the king, with his own pen, dashed the Duke of Devonshire's 
name off the list of privy-councillors — an act of evil omen, 



CuAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 29 

" dipped," said "Walpole, " in a deeper dye than I like in poli- 
tics." The lovers of liberty and order perceived with dismay 
that their monarch was at heart a Stuart. " Strip the Duke 
of Xewcastle of his three lieutenancies," wrote Fox. " Then 
go on to the general rout, but let this beginning be made im- 
mediately." On the same day that the veteran ex-minister 
was thus rewarded for his services to the House of Hanover, 
two young noblemen who before long were to occupy con- 
spicuous stations, the Duke of Grafton and the Marquis of 
Rockingham, were summarily dismissed from the lord-lieu- 
tenancies of their respective counties. The Duke of Devon- 
shire, with proper spirit, insisted on sharing the honorable 
disgrace of his friends, and placed the Lord -lieutenancy of 
Derbyshire at the disposal of the government. Every jDost 
where a Whig had been drawing salary or exercising author- 
ity was now filled by a young Tory or an old Jacobite. It 
was said in the newspapers that Bute had turned out every- 
body whom the Duke of Newcastle had helped to bring in, 
except the king. 

Whenever his cold-blooded rigor flagged, Fox was hounded 
on to his prey by his relentless and rapacious colleagues. " Be- 
fore another question comes," said Lord Shelburne, " let the 
two hundred and thirteen taste some of the plunder of the 
seventy-four." Bute, paraphrasing in a clumsy sentence the 
concise wish of the Roman tyrant, expressed a hope that 
" everything the king detests will be gathered into one osten- 
sible heap, and formed either to be destroyed by him, or, by 
getting the better, to lead him in chains." RiglDy, the worst 
of the graceless clique who lived upon the Duke of Bedford's 
influence and reputation, boasted to his patron of the share 
which he had in encouraging Fox to make a clean sweep of 
the public offices. The court was beside itself with glee ; and 
the princess royal, glad at heart for Bute, but affecting to re- 
joice because her son was at length king in fact as well as in 
name, led the chorus of jubilation. She had a right to triumph. 
A woman's favor and a stripling's whim had proved strong 
enough to balk the wishes of a nation ; for the people, and 
especially the Londoners, to whom Pitt was dearer than ever, 



30 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

did not by any means participate in the satisfaction of their 
rulers. The gratitude and affection with which the city con- 
tinned to regard the man wdio had made it the first capital in 
the world seemed ecpially criminal and contemptible in the 
eyes of those who, for England's sins, were now her masters. 
Rigby, wdio had never been loyal to anything but his bread 
and butter, recommended the Common Council, now that Pitt's 
cause was irretrievably lost, to throw over their idol, and fall 
to their proper business of lighting their lamps and flushing 
their sewers ; and the prime-minister could at length sneer 
with impunity at " the city's darling," an epithet which 
doubtless seemed infinitely ridiculous to the luckiest of royal 
minions. 

To the chief of this crew retribution was not long in com- 
ing. Fox had abandoned the men with whom he had acted 
for five-and-twenty years, in order to plaQe himself at the head 
of a faction which hated him as politicians in all times and 
all countries hate those who differ from them about a ques- 
tion of disputed succession to the throne. The injuries and 
affronts which he had inflicted upon those who once had been 
his allies had cut him off from any chance of reconciliation 
wnth his former part3^ The Whigs, whom he had evicted and 
insulted ; the Jacobites, who had always regarded his family 
as a tribe of renegades ; the lawyers, whom he had so often 
beaten at their own weapons ; his very mercenaries, who, now 
that they had fulfilled their part of the bargain by voting for 
the peace, were in a hurry to prove to their seducer that they 
no longer considered themselves in his debt — one and all vied 
with each other in harassing and humiliating their common 
enemy. One day there was a motion for inquiry into the ac- 
counts of the Pay-office, and the names of four members who 
were known to be in his confidence were ostentatiously struck 
off the list of the proposed committee. On another occasion 
the House of Commons pretended to suspect that its leader 
had forged the names which were attached to a trumpery pe- 
tition. When, after reiterated provocations, he showed signs 
of temper, he was treated to a lecture by one of Pitt's parti- 
sans, who desired him, for the credit of his j^osition, to save 



CiiAP. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 31 

appearances. " It is not my habit/' lie replied, " to mind ap- 
pearances, but realities." His audience, catching at the oppor- 
tunitj with ill-natnred adroitnesss, smothered the last two 
words of the sentence in a shout of insolent laughter ; and 
Fox, as he sat down, declared, in the bitterness of his heart, 
that no man in his situation had ever been so used before. 
The most unforgiving and ingenious of his victims could 
not have invented, for liini a more appropriate punishment 
than the task of guiding the deliberations of an assembly 
whose respect he had forfeited and whose regard he had 
never possessed. 

His only object now was to withdraw from his uneasy pre- 
eminence, and to carry into his retreat as much booty as he 
could contrive to pack. Loaded with sinecures and reversions 
for himself and his children, he was still unsatisfied unless he 
could obtain his peerage without losing his paymastership. 
It may well be believed that the aspirants whom he left be- 
hind him with their fortunes still unmade were not pleased 
at seeing a prize of five-and-twenty thousand a year carried 
out of the ring ; and, before the matter could be settled. Fox 
and Shelburne were involved in an ignoble and tortuous al- 
tercation which ruined anything that remained of the elder 
statesman's good fame, and hampered the younger with a rep- 
utation for duplicity from which he was never able to shake 
himself free. Fox may be said to have won the last of his 
fights ; for he became Lord Holland, kept the Pay-office, and 
got the credit of having made the best known of political rep- 
artees;' while Shelburne gained nothing by the business ex- 
cept a nickname. But there were many to w'hom the quarrel 
served as a pretext for turning against a man who hencefor- 
ward w^ould have nothing to give ; and Fox, if he did not 
know it before, now learned what the friendship of self-inter- 
ested men was worth. Calcraf t, his creature and cousin, whom 
he had raised to vast opulence from a clerkship of forty pounds 

' Lord Bute had endeavored to do his best for Shelburne by charac- 
terizing the affair as " a pious fraud." " I can see the fraud plain enough," 
said Fox ; " but where is the piety ?" 



32 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Cii.vp. I. 

a year, was Shelburne's most active partisan in tlie controver- 
sy ; and when Fox, reljnng on the tender recollections of a 
hundred jobs which they had perpetrated in common, ap- 
pealed to Rigby for sympathy and advice, his confidences 
were rejected with a brutality which, if they had been 
younger men, could only have been expiated at the sword- 
point/ 

Up to November, 1762, Fox had passed for a sharp, self- 
seeking politician, formidable in debate and still more for- 
midable in intrigue, who would recoil from nothing to gain 
his ends, but who was no worse at bottom than most of the 
people by whom he was surrounded. No one expected him 
to prefer the advantage of the State to his own ; but, on the 
other hand, no one accused him of having ill-used any indi- 
vidual who did not stand in the way of his personal profit 
and advancement. When once his exorbitant appetite was in 
course of being gratified, he was not the man to grudge others 
their share. He was accounted as one who made it his rule 
to live and let live on the public, to stick by those who had 
stuck by him, and to observe the laws of that honor which 
proverbially exists among tlie class to which so many place- 
men of his day belonged. Nobody thought well of him ex- 
cept his wife, his children, and his servants ; but not a few 
had a kindly feeling towards him, and liked him the better 
for his disclaiming any pretence to a virtue of which, after 
all, he was not more devoid than some of his seemlier com- 
petitors. 

But the five months which Henry Fox spent in Bute's cab- 
inet entirely reversed the opinion entertained of him by his 
equals, and undid him in the estimation of his countrymen at 
large. He had not played fair. He had broken the rules of 
the game. He had deserted his comrades, and had attacked 

* Fox met Rigby's chariot in St. James's Street, and, leaning over the 
door, began to abuse Shelljurne as " a pei"fidious and infamous liar." 
"You tell your story of Shelburne," rejoined the other. '■'■He has a 
damned one to tell of you, and I do not trouble myself which is the 
truth;" and, pushing Fox's elbow from the window, Rigby ordered his 
coachman to drive away. 



Chap. I.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 33 

them with an animosity which would have been indecent if 
directed against the most inveterate of foes. He had cruelly 
wronged a multitude of humble people who had hitherto 
been exempted from the severities of party warfare. And all 
this he had apparently done in the wantonness of deliberate 
but almost aimless malice ; without any benefit to himself 
which could compensate for a tithe of the unpopularity that 
pursued him into his retirement, and attended him to his 
grave. There was no crime of which the public believed him 
incapable, and not very many which he was not expressly 
charged with having committed. In the political literature 
of the next eleven years, Lord Holland supplied an unfailing 
synonj'm for tyrant, incendiary, and public robber. When- 
ever the reader lights upon the title which Fox had waded 
through so much to earn, it is ten to one that within the next 
half-dozen lines there will be found an allusion to the gal- 
lows;' and, what is more significant than the direct vitupera- 
tion with which he was assailed, he is nowhere mentioned in 
terms of praise or charity or even of indiiference. Junius, 
his only friend among the satirists who wrote between the 
Peace of Paris and the outbreak of the American war, proved 
his good-will by abstaining from any reference to the hated 
name. Mason branded Lord Holland in his smoothest, and 

' A ferocious libel, published originally under Churchill's initials^ith 
much else that affords desultory but not unprofitable reading on an idle 
afternoon, may be noticed in the "Foundling for Wit" — a collection of 
extracts, elegant and otherwise, published in annual volumes between the 
years 1768 and 1773. The ghost of a felon who bad lately died at Ty- 
burn for forging Lord Holland's name to a lease appears to the paymas- 
ter-general as he lies iu his bedroom at Holland House, 

" revolving future schemes 
His country to betray." 

The most vigorous lines read like a horrible travesty of the last verse in 
" Edwin and Angelina." 

" Not all thy art or wealth can e'er 
Avert the stern decree ; 
The same base hand that stretched my neck 
Shall do the same for thee." 
3 



34 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. I. 

Churcliill in liis most pointed, verse.* The men of fashion 
whom he had helped into comfortable places, and in whose 
company he had drunk whole cellarfuls of claret, were at the 
pains to collect, and republish in a permanent shape, all the 
savage lampoons which might inform posterity how univer- 
sally their old boon companion was detested. And Gray 
summed up the popular abhorrence in stanzas of extraordi- 
nary power, which describe the fallen statesman, " old, and 
abandoned by each venal friend," as consumed by an undying 
rancor against the people of London on account of their fidel- 
ity to Pitt.^ "With an energy such as he nowhere else ex- 
pends upon contemporary themes, the poet depicts Lord Hol- 
land in his gloomy retreat on the bleak shore of the North 
Foreland, which he had made still more hideous with mimic 
ruins in order to feed his diseased fancy with an image of the 
desolation to which he would have condemned the disobedi- 
ent city, if only he had met with colleagues bold enough to 
carry out his atrocious designs. 

* " Lift against virtue Power's oi3pressive rod ; 

Betray thy country, and deny thy God ; 
And, in one general comprehensive line 
To group (which volumes scarcely could define), 
Whate'er of sin and dulness can be said, 
Join to a Fox's heart a Dashwood's head." 

Churchill, Ejnstle to Hogarth. 

' Gray, with an affectation unworthy of his powers, gives the title of an 
"Impromptu" to a performance which, by its condensation of meaning 
and lucidity of expression, recalls the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." 
Such lines as these are not produced offhand : 

" Ah ! said the sighing peer, had Bute been true, 
Nor Murray's, Rigby's, Bedford's friendshi}) vain ; 
Far better scenes than these had blessed our view, 
And realized the beauties which we feign. 

" Purged by the sword, and purified by fire, 

Then had we seen proud London's hated walls. 
Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter's choir, 
And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul's." 



1749-G8.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 35 



CHAPTER II. 
1749-1768. 

Lord Holland in his own Family.— Birth of Charles James Fox.— His 
Childhood.— Wandsworth.— Eton and Paris.— Dr. Barnard.— Tlie Mus« 
Etonenses.— Picture at Holland House.— Lady Sarah Lennox.— Fox at 
Oxford.— Tour in Ital3\— Fox's Industry and Accomplisliments.—His 
Return to England. 

LoKD Holland was neither so wicked nor so imliappy as 
the world supposed him. He had never courted esteem, and, 
while his health was still fairly good and his nerves strong, he 
cared not a farthing for popularity. He looked upon the 
public as a milch-cow, which might bellow and toss its horns 
as much as ever it pleased, now that he had filled his pail and 
had placed the gate between himself and the animal. But, 
though he liad no self-respect to wound, he could be touched 
through his affection ; for this political buccaneer, whose hand 
had been against every man and in every corner of the na- 
tional till, was in private a warm-hearted and faithful friend. 
Lord Holland cannot be called nice in the choice of some 
among the objects on whom he bestowed his regard; but, 
once given, it never was withdrawn. He had attached him- 
self to Rigby with a devotion most unusual in an intimacy 
made at Newmarket, and cemented over the bottle;' and his 
feelings were more deeply and more permanently hurt by the 
unkindness of one coarse and corrupt adventurer than by the 
contempt and aversion of every honest man in the country 
who read the newspapers. To the end of his life he could not 

' " I dined at Holland House," wrote Rigby on one occasion, " where, 
though I drank claret with the master of it from dinner till two o'clock 
in the morning, I could not wash away the sorrow he is in at the shock- 
ing condition his eldest boy is in— a distemper they call Sanvitoss dance. 
I believe I spell it damnably." 



36 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

mention liis old associate without a touch of pathos which has 
its effect even upon those whose reason inchnes them to re- 
gard his expressions of tenderness as the lamentations of a 
rogue who has been jockeyed by his accomplice. " I loved 
him," he says to George Selwyn ; " and whether to feel or 
not to feel on such an occasion be most w^orthy of a man, I 
won't dispute ; but the fact is that I have been, and still am, 
whenever I think of it, very unhappy." Six years after the 
breach he was still writing in the same strain. " There is one 
question which, I hope, will not be asked — 

' Has life no sourness, drawn so near its end V 

Indeed it has; yet I guard against it as much as possible, and 
am weak enough sometimes to think that if Rigby chiefly, and 
some others, had pleased, I should have walked down the vale 
of years more easily. But it is weak in me to think so often 
as I do of Tiigby, and you will be ashamed of me." 

Whatever Lord Holland suffered by the coldness and 
treachery of the outside world was amply made up to him 
within his domestic circle. As will always be the case with 
a man of strong intelligence and commanding powers, who 
has the gift of forgetting himself in others, there was no limit 
to the attachment which he inspired and the happiness which 
he spread around him. In all that he said and wrote, his ina- 
bility to recognize the existence of public duty contrasts sin- 
gularly w^itli his admirable unconsciousness that he had any 
claims whatever upon those whom he loved ; and, as a sure 
result, he was not more hated abroad than adored at home. 
That home presented a beautiful picture of undoubting and 
undoubted affection ; of perfect similarity in tastes and pur- 
suits; of mutual appreciation, wdiich thorough knowledge of 
the world, and the strong sense inherent in the Fox character, 
never allowed to degenerate into mutual adulation. There 
seldom were children who might so easil}^ have been guided 
into the straight and noble path, if the father had possessed a 
just conception of the distinction between right and wrong; 
but the notion of making anybody of wliom he was fond un- 
comfortable, for the sake of so very doubtful an end as the 



1749-GS.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 37 

attainment of self-control, was altogether foreign to his creed 
and his disposition. However, if the sterner virtues were 
wanting among his young people, the graces were there in 
abundance. Never was the natural man more dangerously 
attractive than in Lord Holland's family ; and most of all in 
the third son, a boy who was the pride and light of the house, 
with his sweet temper, his rare talents, and his inexhaustible 
vivacity.* 

Charles James Fox was born on the twenty-fourth Januar}-, 
1T49. His father was already tenant of the suburban palace 
and paradise from which he was to derive his title ; but it was 
a work of no small time and labor to prepare the mansion for 
its great destinies, and the noise of carpenters and the bustle 
of upholsterers obliged Lady Caroline to choose a lodging in 
Conduit Street for the scene of an event which would have, 
added distinction even to Holland House.'' Holland House, 
however, was the seat of Charles's boyhood ; and his earliest 
associations were connected M-ith its lofty avenues, its trim 
gardens, its broad stretches of deep grass, its fantastic gables, 
its endless vista of boudoirs, libraries, and drawing-rooms, each 
more home-like and habitable than the last. All who knew 
him at this stage of his existence recollected him as at once 
the most forward and the most engaging of small creatures, 

' Lord Ilollaud had four sous — Stephen, Henry (who died so young 
that well-informed writers have called Charles the second son), Charles, 
and Henry Edward. 

^ Fox bought Holland House in 17G7. Up to that date he paid for the 
property a rent less than is asked for five out of six among the hundreds 
of dwellings which now fringe its northern and eastern outskirts, but 
which have not been permitted to invade the sacred enclosure. "It will 
be a great pity," wrote Scott, " when this ancient house must come down 
and give way to rows and crescents. One is chiefly affected by the air of 
deep seclusion which is spread around the domain." This was the limit 
of what Sir Walter would say in favor of a building which he was per- 
haps too good a Tory to admire as it deserved. Walpole, writing in 1747, 
says, " Mr. Fox gave a great ball last week in Holland House, which he 
has taken for a long term, and where he is making great improvements. 
It is a brave old house, and belonged to the gallant Earl of Holland, the 
lover of Charles the First's queen." 



38 TPIE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

His father worsliipped him from the very first. " Dear Caro- 
line," he writes in March, 1752, " send me word bj tlie bearer 
how my dear Charles does. Send John Walker to-morrow 
morning with another account, for I propose shooting, and 
not being in till three or four. I can do nothing in the anx- 
iety of not hearing of him." On another occasion Henry 
Fox thus replies to a complaint that he was too much absorbed 
in politics to please so loving a wife and so fond a mother. 
" I am very sorry to hear of poor dear Thumb's being so bad 
in his cough. For God's sake, have the greatest attention for 
him. K he is ill, you will see whether my state affairs make 
me forget domestic affection or no. But I pray God no trial 
of that kind may ever happen to me." " I do believe," he 
says elsewhere, " Ste has his share of favor in a proper way 
for his age; but I suppose Charles is so continually at home, 
and Ste so continually abroad, which must give Charles an ad- 
vantage with those who stay at home. Don't be peevish, pray, 
with the dear child for that, nor for anything else ; neither 
will you seriously, I know ; for he has made you love him as 
much as all of us." 

The father might honestly repudiate a charge of favoritism ; 
for the love which Charles enjoyed was never at the expense 
of his brothers. " I got to Holland House," wrote Fox, " last 
night at seven ; found all the boys well ; but, to say the truth, 
took most notice of Charles. I never saw him better or more 
merry. Harry was just gone to bed and fast asleep. I saw 
him this morning, when he entered into the conversation very 
much by signs, but does not speak a word." And again, " I 
rode to Holland House this morning, and found Harry in his 
nurse's arms in the park, looking very cold but very well. I 
called him Squeaker. He looked at me and laughed, but, on 
the whole, appeared to like my horse better than me." But, 
however ready Henry Fox might be to pet and sj^oil the 
others, it was impossible not to be on rather exceptional terms 
with a little fellow wdio made himself a companion at an age 
when most children are only amusing as playthings, " I dined 
at home to-day tete-a-tete with Charles," wrote the statesman to 
his wife when the boy was hardly three years old, " intending 



17-19-GS.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 39 

to do business; but he lias found me pleasanter employment. 
I grow immoderately fond of him." " Is he my sensible child 
still ?" he asks, in December, 1754 ; and in a subsequent letter 
he answers his own question by describing his five-year-old 
son as " very well, very pert, very argumentative," overflow- 
ing with good-humor, and so mad about the stage that he was 
reading every play on which lie could lay his tiny hands. In 
1756, Charles had gone, as usual, to the theatre. "He says," 
wrote Fox to Lady Caroline, " he loves you as well indeed, 
but sticks to it that you are not so handsome as I am, and 
therefore that he had rather be like me; and he was dis- 
pleased this morning when Miss Bellamy found out, as I al- 
ways do, his great resemblance to you." And, a few days 
later, " Charles is perfectly well, and Mrs. Farmer is therefore 
sorry that 'Alexander the Great' was acted to-night, because 
she wished him two or three days of confirmed health before 
he ventured. But he is gone to eat biscuit there for supper, 
and to come the moment the play is over to take his rhubarb. 
Charles is now in perfect health and spirits as it is possible 
for any animal to be. He is all life, spirit, motion, and good- 
humor. He says I look like a villain though ; and is sure 
everybody in the House of Commons that don't know me 
must take me for such." Better testimony to his marvellous 
but not ungraceful precocity than the admiration of an "in- 
dulgent father is given by Charles Fox himself, who remem- 
bered being present in the room when his mother made a de- 
sponding remark about his passionate temper. " ISTever mind," 
said Henry Fox, always for leaving both well and ill alone. 
" He is a very sensible little fellow, and will learn to cure 
himself." "I will not deny," said Charles, when he told the 
story, " that I was a very sensible little boy — a very clever 
little boy. What I heard made an impression on me, and was 
of use to me afterwards." If he mended his faults so readily, 
it certainly is a pity that he did not overhear more of the pa- 
rental criticisms ; for of correction and reprimand he received 
little or none. " Let nothing be done to break his spirit," 
Lord Holland used to say. " The world will do that business 
fast enough." The impression left by the father's subservi- 



40 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

eiice to all the child's whims and fancies is preserved in many 
well-known anecdotes which, for the most part, are probably 
mythical. The shortest and best of these stories is to the 
effect that Charles declared his intention to destroy a watch. 
"Well," said Lord Holland, "if you must, I suppose you 
must." 

The boy very soon got beyond the teaching of women, as 
Avomen tlien were educated. There was truth in the taunt 
which, long afterwards, the satirists levelled against him : how, 

" born a disputant, a sophist bred, 
His nurse lie silenced and his tutor led." 

\ An unlucky blunder which poor Lady Caroline made in a 
question of Roman history settled at once and forever her 
claims as an instructress in the estimation of her irrepressible 
son ; and, when just turned of seven, he was sent to a school 
at Wandsworth, then much in vogue among the aristocracy. 
The master was a Monsieur Pampellonne, from whom Charles 
Fox perhaps acqnired his excellent French accent. This change 
in his circumstances was ordained, like everything else, by his 
own will and pleasure. Nothing can be more quaint and 
droll than the respectful delicacy with which the most head- 
strong and audacious man in England propounded the ques- 
tion of home or school for the consideration of his small lord 
and master, " I beg to know," Fox wrote, in February, 1756, 
" what disposition Charles comes up in, and which you would 
have me encourage, his going immediately to "Wandsworth, 
or staying till he can go to Eton." And, shortly afterwards, 
"I was going to dine tete-d-tete with Charles, when I was sent 
for to the House of Commons. It proved a false alarm, and 
only prevented my dining w^ith him, but not playing at picket 
with him and Peter. He is infinitely engaging, and clever 
and pretty. He coughs a little, and is hot. AYould it not be 
best to persuade him to go to Wandsworth for his health ?" 
At last the decision came. " Charles," wrote his father, " de- 
termines to go to Wandsworth." Eighteen months afterwards 
he determined to go to Eton, and to Eton he accordingly 
went. There he studied hard, under the care and direction 



1749-GS.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 41 

of the Rev. Dr. Francis, known among boj's as one of the in- 
ninnerable translators of Horace, and among men as the fa- 
ther of a writer who has contrived to occupy a greater space 
in the annals of literature than if he had been undisputed 
author of the " Areopagitica" and the " Thoughts on the Cause 
of the Present Discontents." In a happy hour for his own 
future repose. Lord Holland re})aid the services of Dr. Francis 
by procuring for his promising son Philip a clerkship in the 
office of the secretary of state.' 

Though saddled with the encumbrance of a private tutor, 
Charles Fox was highly popular among his schoolfellows. 
There was that about him which everywhere made him the 
king of his company, without effort on his own part, or jeal- 
ousy on the part of others. Young and old alike watched 
with hope and delight the development of that fascinating 
yet masterful character. Lord Holland was proud and glad 
to admit that the son bade fair to be "as much and as uni- 
versally beloved" as ever the father was hated. AVhen the 
boy was still in his fourteenth year, the Duke of Devonshire, 
who was not a man to sow compliments broadcast, concluded 
a letter, addressed to the paymaster on high matters of State, 

' Dr. Francis had kept a school at Esher, in Surrey. Gibbon, who was 
with him for a few weeks at the age of fourteen, complains that " he pre- 
ferred the pleasures of London to the instruction of his pupils." With a 
view of reconciling his tastes and his duties, Francis became private chap- 
lain to Lady Holland, and was domesticated in her family. He taught 
Lady Sarah Lennox to declaim, and Charles Fox to read. Dr. Francis 
pronounced Lord Holland himself the very worst reader he ever heard; 
a defect which the Doctor attributed to the last cause which any one 
W'ould have suspected — his having begun to read the Bible too early. 

Anotlier member of the staff of Holland House was Sir George Macart- 
ney, a handsome dashing young Irishman, Avho acted as a sort of travel- 
ling tutor and companion to Charles. Macartney, who had to a remark- 
able degree the talent of success, talked and pushed himself into a celeb- 
rity among his contemporaries of which their descendants have ceased 
to take much account. He became no less a personage than Lord Macart- 
ney, President of Madras, Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, and Am- 
bassador to China. The influence and position which Lord Holland en- 
joyed in his lifetime must have been very great when measured by the 
number and importance of his satellites. 



42 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

with the words " Commend me to your son Charles for his 
sagacity." ]S[ever was there a more gracious child, more rich 
in promise, more prone to good, when, in the spring of 1763, 
the devil entered into the heart of Lord Holland. Harassed 
by his dispute with Lord Shelburue, and not unwilling to 
withdraw himself and his new title for a time from the notice 
of his countrymen, he could think of no better diversion than 
to take Charles from his books, and convey him to the Con- 
tinent on a round of idleness and dissipation. At Spa his 
amusement was to send his son every night to the gaming- 
table with a pocketful of gokl; and (if family tradition may 
be trusted whel'e it tells against family credit) the parent took 
not a little pains to contrive that the boy should leave France 
a finished rake.' After four months spent in this fashion, 
Charles, of his own accord, persuaded his father to send him 
back to Eton, where he passed another year with more advan- 
tage to himself than to the school. His Parisian experiences, 
aided by his rare social talents and an unbounded command 
of cash, produced a visible and durable change for the worse 
in the morals and habits of the place." 

^ Lord Russell's " Life and Times of Charles James Fox," vol. i. p. 4. 

' The parents of some among our golden youth would do well to no- 
tice the epithet attached by a born gentleman to the expense and luxury 
in which Henry Fox brought up his family. " He educated his children," 
said Lord Shelburne, " without the least regard to morality, and with 
such extravagant vulgar indulgence that the great change which has 
taken place among our j^outh has been dated from the time of his son's 
going to Eton." 

The discipline of the school in Dr. Barnard's day was none of the best. 
Mr. Whately, in a letter jjublished among the Grenville papers, relates 
that he was riding through Eton with Lady Mulgrave, accompanied by 
lier child on a pony, when something in their appearance caught the 
fancy of the boys, who at once jiroceeded to mob the party. Things 
were beginning to look serious, when George Greuville's son, who hap- 
pened luckily to be in the crowd, came to the rescue. "Her ladyship 
was frightened, dismounted, and fled for refuge into Lord Mulgrave's 
chaise, leaving me and the little urchin in the midst of the circle. My 
good friend Tom give me a wink and a whisper, advising me to make 
my retreat as soon as possible. I followed his advice, and think he got 
me out of a scrape." This, says the editor of the papers, was an early 



17-19-08.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 43 

Dr. Barnard, the head-master, a man who had too much 
spirit, humor, and independence ever to become one of George 
the Third's bishops, did his best to laugh Charles out of his 
fopperies and improprieties; but he had not the heart to deal 
sharply ■with a lad whom he loved all the better for being, like 
himself, " rather a mutineer than a courtier." The Doctor 
was great in elocution. His reading of the Church Service 
has been cited as "absolute perfection;" and his pulpit man- 
ner was much admired, perhaps rather in consequence than in 
spite of its hastte and vehemence. The same description ex- 
actly applies to the declamation of his pupil ; but, long be- 
fore he sat under Dr. Barnard, Charles Fox could get quite as 
many words into a minute as the conditions of human respi- 
ration would allow. He could always obtain leave to run up 
to London when an interesting question was on in the House 
of Commons.' The head-master, with good reason, attended 
carefully to the rhetorical training of bo^'s who had boroughs 
waiting for them as soon as they came of age ; and Fox, with 
his repertory of favorite passages from the dramatists, and his 
passion for an argument, was always to the front both in the 
speech-room and the debating society. A tribute to his school- 
boy eloquence remains in the shape of a dozen contemporary 
couplets from the facile pen of Lord Carlisle, of which the 
best that can be said is that they are no worse than anything 
which his lordship's celebrated kinsman produced while he 
was still at Harrow.'' 

indication of the sagacity and discretion for wliicli Mr. Thomas Grenville 
was so eminently distinguished during liis long career. 

* " The Speaker," wrote Henry Fox, in November, 17Go, " fell ill, which 
disappointed Charles of a debate on Friday." 

' " How will, my Fox, alone, thy strength of parts 
Shake the loud senate, animate the hearts 
Of fearful statesmen, while around you stand 
Both Peers and Commons listening your command ! 
While Tully's sense its weight to you affords, 
His nervous sweetness shall adorn your words. 
What praise to Pitt, to Townshend, e'er was due, 
In future times, my Fox, shall wait on you." 
These lines are quite up to the standard of the poem on " Childish 



44 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

Dr. Barnard possessed what is by far the rarest among all 
the qualities of an instructor, the tolerance that will permit 
clever boys to be clever in their own way. The insipidity of 
school and college exercises, which is ordinarily charged to 
the account of the author, is quite as often due to the fastid- 
iousness of the judges whom it is his aim to please. Those 
who insist on perfect good taste and demure propriet}^ in the 
productions of the young may get taste and propriety, but 
they will get nothing more; as may be seen by any one who 
compares the value of everything which has been written to 
win 'the verdict of professors and masters of colleges, with 
much that has been given to the world by men, no older than 
undergraduates, who have boldly obeyed the impulse of their 
unfettered genius. x\ll the prize verse of Cam and Isis to- 
gether is not worth half a canto of " Childe Harold,^' or ten 
stanzas of the " Hymn on the Nativity." The schoolmasters of 
North and Fox, though they had not a Milton or a Byron to 
educate, were too sensible to be annoyed by the crudity or 
terrified by the audacity of aspiring sixteen ; and beneath the 
rule of Dr. Barnard and his predecessor the Eton muse was 
distinguished by a pleasant spice of originality, which is no- 
where so marked as in the effusions of the two lads who were 
destined to shake the senate by their dissensions, and to ruin 
each other by their fatal reconciliation. Among all Fox's 
imitations of the classical writers, there is nothing dull or com- 
monplace except a Greek idjd in which a party of shepherds 
discourse about a recent eclipse in a vein something too scep- 
tical and materialistic for Arcadia — a performance which, at 
the worst, displays an acquaintance with Theocritus credit- 
able to so young a scholar. A piece of a much higher order 
is a farewell to Eton, in which the boy addresses Dr. Barnard 
as the English Quintilian, and describes himself as more fond- 
ly attached to the Playing-fields than even to the groves and 

Recollections" in the "Hours of Idleness;" with the additional advan- 
tage that Lord Carlisle called Fox by his proper name, while Byron ad- 
dressed his schoolfellows as Euryalus and Lycus and Alonzo, and, with- 
out any excuse on the score of metre, must needs sj^eak of Harrow as 
Ida. 



1749-08.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 45 

lawns of Holland House' But still more full of spirit and 
promise are the elegies in which Lord North and Iiis future 
rival sang their premature loves. " Laura, indeed," wrote 
IS^orth, " is fair, and Lydia too is fair. Fairer is Aula, but 
fairer after another model. Small art thou, Chloris ; but not 
small is thy glory, as of a violet that nestles lowly in the dew." 
As for Clarissa, the young connoisseur tells ns, in the ver}' 
neatest of pentameters, that, while each separate feature fails 
to please, she pleases as a whole. In Latin quite as good, 
and with an even more astonishing air of maturity, Charles 
Fox celebrates the dove as the courser of Venus, and the dis- 
creet and silent messenger of divided lovers.'' As for him- 
self, his sighs are directed to Susanna, a name so ill adapted 
to O vidian poetry that it can hardly have been fictitious. His 
goddess, in all likelihood, was his cousin Lady Susan Strang- 
ways, a daughter of Lord Ilchester, between whom and him- 
self there existed a disparity of years quite sufficient to attract 
the homage of a schoolboy. 

The young Etonian is as alive as ever on the canvas of one 
of Sir Joshua's very best pictures. There he may be seen, 
smart, but rather untidy, in a blue laced coat, looking amaz- 

' " Ut patriae (neque enim ingratus natalia rura 
Prfeposui campis, mater Etoua, tuis), 
Ut patriae, carisque sodalibus, ut tibi dicam, 
Anglice, supremum, Quiutiliane, Vale. 

^ " Nempe, alis invecta tuis, tibi semper amores 

Fidit in amplexus Martis itura Venus. 
Garrulitas nostras quondam temeraria linguae 

Indicio prodit multa tacenda levi; 
At tibi vox nulla est." 

There is a sort of fifth-form coxcombry about the lines which must have 
tickled such a humorist as Dr. Barnard. 

" If I had a boy," said Fox to Samuel Rogers, " I -would make him 
write verses. It is the only way to know the meaning of words." An 
Etonian to the backbone, he maintained to the end of his life that none 
but those who had learned the art within the shadow of Henry the 
Sixth's Chapel ever acquired " a correct notion of Greek, or even Latin, 
metre." 



46 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. U. 

ingly old for fourteen, with his jet-black curls, and his strongly- 
moulded rounded features of a Jewish cast — if that nation 
could be associated with poor Charles Fox in any connection 
but one. The boy is represented Avith a paper in his hand, 
from which he is apparently holding forth for the benefit of 
his pretty cousin, and his prettier aunt, of whom the former 
was soon to marry an actor, and the latter had already refused 
a king. Lady Sarah Lennox, as the sweetest of little children, 
had been the pet of old George the Second. Her mother died 
before she had left the nursery, and she was thenceforward 
brought up, rather as a daughter than a sister, by the Duch- 
ess of Leinster and Lady Caroline Fox. She was not likely 
long to be a burden on her chaperons. " Her great beauty," 
said Henry Fox, " was a peculiarity of countenance that made 
her at the same time different from, and prettier than, any 
other girl I ever saw." In January, 1761, Horace AValpole 
gives an enthusiastic account of some private theatricals per- 
formed at Holland House, in which she played Jane Shore, 
of all parts to be selected for a young lady who still was, or 
ought to have been, in the schoolroom. "Lady Sarah," writes 
Walpole, " was more beautiful than you can conceive. No 
Magdalene by Correggio was half so lovely and expressive." * 
So thought the king, who, in the first flush of his royalty, 
imagined that his mother and his groom of the stole would 
allow him to choose a wife for himself. He sent his propos- 
al, couched in terms somewhat unusual, but quite unmistak- 
able, through Lady Susan Strangways, who, as he well knew, 
was in the habit of spending half her days at Holland Llouse. 
The next time that Lady Sarah Lennox appeared at court, 

^ lu the large picture at Holland House Rejaiolds has concentrated liis 
strength upon young Charles Fox, and does scanty justice to the ladies; 
but there is another Sir Joshua, engraved in the second volume of 
" George Selwyn and his Contemporaries," which has immortalized such 
a ftice as may not be seen in a generation. "In white, and with her hair 
about her ears," this exquisite jDortrait exactly answers to Walpole's de- 
scription of Lady Sarah as Jane Shore. The expression, wliich is studied 
to suit the character, says everything for the consummate art of the 
painter, and not a little for the lady's proficiency as an actress. 



1749-G8.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 47 

the king took lier aside into a bow-window, and asked wlietli- 
er she had got his message, and what she thought o£it. " Tell 
me," he pleaded, " for my happiness depends on it." " J^otli- 
ing, sir," replied the lady, who, to say truth, had just then 
some one else in her head. "Nothing comes of nothing," 
said his Majesty; and he turned away in manifest vexation, 
having done his duty under difficulties to which a monarch 
has a right to anticipate that he will never find himself ex- 
posed. 

Lady Sarah, while spending her Easter in the country, had 
the misfortune to fall with her horse and break her leg. The 
king questioned Henry Fox closely and anxiously about her 
state, with signs of deep feeling which were meant to be ob- 
served. The evidences of his devotion were duly conveyed 
to the right quarter by means of a minute report from the 
paymaster to his wife, who was nursing her sister down in 
Somersetshire.' Six weeks of unwelcome leisure enabled Lady 
Sarah to reconsider the whole matter; and, before the sum- 
mer had set in, she was back in London, knowing her own 
mind, and looking more beautiful than ever. The town began 
to talk. " The birthday," wrote Wal}X)le on the thirteenth of 
June, "exceeded the splendor of the 'Arabian Nights.' Do 
you remember one of those stories where a prince has eight 
statues of diamonds, which he overlooks because he fancies 
he wants a ninth ; and the ninth proves to be pure flesh and 
blood ? Somehow or other. Lady Sarah is the ninth statue." 
A witty lady of rank, who had reason to be proud of her fig- 
ure, caught Lady Sarah by the skirt as she was entering the 
presence chamber in the order of precedence. " Do," she said, 
" let me go in before you this once, for you never will have 
another opportunity of seeing my beautiful back." June was 
passed in a flutter of hope and agitation ; but the princess 
royal had no mind to be mother-in-law even to so bewitching 
a Cinderella, The letter in which Lady Sarah announces to 

' "If Lady Sarah don't be quiet," wrote Henry Fox to his wife on the 
nineteenth of April, 1761, "it will be the longer before she can dance, and 
show her pretty self to advantage." 



48 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

her friend Lady Susan that licr hopes were at an end — a let- 
ter the spelling and punctuation of which prove that the 
writer was worthy to occupy the throne of Anne and Mary 
of Orano-e — is the most charniino^ of all the documents which 
bear upon English history.' His Majesty treated her with 
marked distinction both then and afterwards ; but it was a 
cruel courtesy to name her as a bridesmaid. Lady Sarah, 
however, had her revenge. Walpole, in the narrative of the 
royal wedding which he sent to General Conway, tells us that, 
" with neither features nor air, she was by far the chief angel ;" 
and it was an easy triumph to outshine a bride wliose looks 
never earned her a compliment until, after tlie lapse of many 
years, her own chamberlain ventured to express his belief 
that " the bloom of her ugliness was going off." Time, which 
was kind to Queen Charlotte, bore lightly on her rival. In 
1781 the Prince of Wales declared that Lady Sarah could not 
have been more lovely in the days when his father was at 
her feet. She became the mother of the most illustrious fam- 
ily of heroes that ever graced tlie roll of the British army. 
Twice on the evening of a hard-fought battle Lord Welling- 
ton snatched a moment to let her know that two ISTapiers had 
been gloriously wounded. Within a few hours after he had 

' The most delightful passnge, if it were possible to make a choice, is 
that in which Lady Sanih carefully defines the extent and nature of her 
disappointment. " I did not cry I assure you which I believe you will, as 
I know you were more set upon it than I was, the thing I am most angry 
at is looking so like a fool as I shall for having gone so often for noth- 
ing, but I don't mucli care, if he was to change his mind again (wliich 
can't be tho') and not give a liery very good reason for his conduct I 
would not have him." The whole letter, with much else of the highest 
value and interest, may be found in Princess Mary Liechtenstein's vol- 
umes. When Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War, 
was seventeen, he spelled as badly as his mother at the same age, and 
minded his stops, if possible, even less ; but his early letters, like hers, 
positively sparkle with lire and fun. He certainly inherited her beauty. 
An officer who saw him, for the first time, left for dead under a tree at 
Casal Noval, where he had been shot down within a few yards of the 
French muzzles, thought him the handsomest man he had ever met or 
dreamed of. 



1749-08.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 49 

been helped down the breach of Cindad Rodrigo, the second 
of the three, writing with his left hand, told her that he had 
lost his best arm at the head of the storming party. With 
sons as good as they were brave and gifted, every one of 
whom loved her as she deserved, she had little reason to envy 
her old admirer the moral reputation, the martial exploits, or 
the filial affection of the Prince of Wales and the Dnke of 
York. 

Charles Fox left Eton for Oxford in 1704. He was entered 
at Hertford College, which, crashed down for a time by its 
wealthier neighbors in the struggle for academical existence, 
has in our own day been munificently re-endowed as a train- 
ing-school of principles and ideas very different from those 
ordinarily associated wuth the name of its greatest son. Early 
in George the Third's reign the college flourished under the 
care of Dr. Newcome, a good, wise, and learned divine, who 
afterwards became Primate of Ireland on the nomination of 
Lord Fitzwilliam. A poor foundation has attractions for none 
but rich scholars ; and Dr. Newcome's pupils were, for the 
most part, young men of family. The first Lord Malmesbury, 
who was in the same set as Charles Fox, though not in the 
same college, informs us that the lads who ranked as gentle- 
men-commoners enjoyed the privilege of living as they pleased, 
and were never called upon to attend either lectures or hall 
or chapel. " The men," says his lordship, " wnth whom I 
lived were very pleasant, but very idle, fellows. Our life was 
an imitation of high life in London. Luckily, drinking was 
not the fashion ; but what we did drink was claret, and w^e 
had our regular round of evening card-parties, to the great 
annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of 
surprise to me how so man}' of us made our way so well in 
the world, and so creditably." ' 



' Lord Malmesbury was the son of Mr. Harris, a member of Parliament 
and a placeman, with a love for the by-waj's of literature. When he took 
his seat in the House of Commons, John Townshcud asked who he was, 
and, being told that he had written on " Grammar and Harmony," ob- 
served, " Why does he come here, where he will find neither ?" 

4 



50 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

Among these pleasant fellows Charles Fox passed for the 
pleasantest; but idle he was not. He read as hard as any 
young Englishman wdio does not look to university success 
for his livelihood or advancement will ever read for reading's 
sake. lie gave himself diligently to mathematics, which he 
liked " vastly." " I believe they are useful," he writes, " and 
I am sure they are entertaining, which is alone enough to 
recommend them to me." Pursuing them with zest at the 
age when they most rapidly and effectually fulfil their special 
function of bracing the reasoning faculties for future use, he 
got more profit from them than if he had been a senior 
wrangler. "I did not," said Fox, speaking of the Univer- 
sity, " expect my life here could be so pleasant as I find it ; 
but I really think, to a man who reads a great deal, there 
cannot be a more agreeable place." He loved Oxford as dear- 
ly as did Shelley, and for the same reasons, and quitted it al- 
most as much against his will.' By his own request he was 
permitted to spend a second year at college, where he resided 
continuously, both in and out of term-time, whenever his fa- 
ther could be induced to spare his company. He remained 
at Oxford during the long vacation of 1765, reading as if his 
bread depended on a fellowship, and was seldom to be seen 
outside his own rooms, except when standing at the book- 
seller's counter, deep in Ford or Massinger. He was one of 
those students who do not need the spur. " Application like 
yours," wrote Dr. ISlewcome, " requires some intermission, and 
3'ou are the only person with Mdiom I have ever had connec- 
tion to whom I could say this." Many years afterwards, when 
Charles Fox was secretary of state, he took the precaution 
of carrying his old tutor's letter in his pocketbook as a tes- 



' Shelley's liappy and peaceful industry at Oxford, and his misery 
■when he was driven forth from that quiet haven into a world where he 
was as much at home as a bird-of-paradise on the side of Bencruachan, 
are portrayed with almost preternatural vividness in Hogg's strange frag- 
ment of biography, perhaps the most interesting book in our language 
that has never been republished. 



1749-CS.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 51 

timonial ready to be produced whenever ho was rallied for 
laziness by his colleagues in the cabinet/ 

Three more years of such a life would have fortified his 
character and moulded his tastes ; would have preserved him 
from untold evil, and quadrupled his influence as a statesman. 
But everything which the poor fellow tried to do for himself 
was undone by the fatal caprice of his father. " Charles," 
wrote Lord Holland, in Jul}^ 1765, " is now at Oxford study- 
ing very hard, after two months at Paris, which he relished as 
much as ever. Such a mixture was never seen ; but, extraor- 
dinarj'- as it is, it seems likely to do very well." His lord- 
ship, like many other people, apparently thought that a theory 
of education cannot be pushed too far. Two months of for- 
eign travel had agreed so well with his son tliat two years of 
it might effect wonders. In the spring of 1766, Charles was 
taken from Oxford ; and in the autumn Lord and Lady Hol- 
land once more started for the Continent. Travelling in pa- 
triarchal fashion, with three sons and a daughter-in-law, they 
made their way slowly to Naples. There they spent the win- 
ter, with much benefit to Lord Holland's now declining 
health. The old statesman showed better in retirement than 
in office. Those who lived with him found much pleasure and 
little trouble in amusing one who was a delightful com^janion 
to others and to himself. His love of reading had many years 
before excited the envy of Sir Eobert Walpole, who antici- 
pated with positive dismay the time when a mind for whose 
activity the business of three kingdoms hardly sufficed would 
be reduced to seek occupation within the walls of the library 



^ A letter from Dr. Newcome to his one industrious pupil indicates 
that the curriculum at Hertford College was not exceptionally severe. It 
appears that when Charles Fox was away at Paris or in Loudon, the sci- 
entific studies of the other young Whigs remained in abeyance. "As to 
trigonometry," says the Doctor, " it is a matter of entire indifference to the 
other geometricians of the college whether they proceed to the other 
branches of mathematics immediately, or wait a term or two longer. You 
need not, therefore, interrupt your amusements by severe studies, for it is 
wholly unnecessary to take a step onward without you, and therefore we 
shall stop until we have the pleasure of your company." 



62 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

at Hongliton. Lord Holland, if politics had left him any su- 
perfluous energy, might have made a respectable figure as an 
author. His clear but unpretentious letters are those of a 
good writer who was not fond of jDutting pen to paper, and 
he could turn a verse with the best of the clever people of 
fashion to whom rhyming was then an indispensable accom- 
plishment. Several of his fugitive pieces bear the date of 
this tour ; and the most telliitg lines that he ever wrote, in- 
spired by the unfailing theme of Rigby's ingratitude, were 
actually composed, as they profess to have been composed, 
during his return journey over the pass of Mont Cenis.' 

Charles had arranged that Lord Carlisle should join him in 
the course of the winter, so that the two friends might make 
the tour of Italy together ; but when the time came, the young 
nobleman would not leave London, where he was fluttering 
round the shrine of no less a goddess than Lady Sarah.^ 

' This little poem, in something over a score of couplets, exjjresses 
Lord Holland's acknowledgment to Italy for having repaired his " shat- 
tered nerves," and enabled him to look back with equanimity on the in- 
fidelity and selfishness of his former colleagues. 

" Slight was the pain they gave, and short its date. 
I found I could not both despise and hate. 
But, Rigby, what I did for thee endure ! 
Thy serpent's tooth admitted of no cure. 
Lost converse, never thought of without tears ! 
Lost promised hope of my declining years ! 
Oh, what a heavy task 'tis to remove 
Th' accustomed ties of confidence and love ! 
Friendship in anguish turned away her fiice, 
While cunning Interest sneered at her disgrace." 

° Lord Holland addressed from Naples a poetical remonstrance to his 
sister-in-law on her cruelty to Lord Carlisle, in imitation of Horace's ap- 
peal to Lydia in behalf of Sybaris. The opening lines, 

" Sally, Sally, don't deny," 

are very pretty, in spite of a fiilse rhyme and an asseveration that is far 
too strong for the occasion. The second stanza will bear transcription : 

" Manly exercise and sport. 
Hunting, and the tennis-court, 



1749-08.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 53 

When April came, Lord and Lady Holland returned to Eng- 
land; while Charles, who at all times in his life could obtain 
as many companions as he wanted by holding up his finger, 
remained on the Continent with Lord Fitzwilliam, and Mr. 
Uvedale Price, an Eton acquaintance of his own age. In the 
following October the old people crossed the Channel again, 
but got no farther than the South of France, where they made 
an unbroken stay of six months. They were followed by 
Lord Carlisle, who at length tore himself away from London, 
and set forth upon his " necessary banishment ;" broken-heart- 
ed, of course, but, as is pretty evident from his subsequent 
correspondence, by no means inconsolable. Lord Holland, 
who had been wofully bored at Nice,' though he admitted 
that angels could not enjoy better weather, was sincerely 
grateful for the trouble which the young men took to amuse 
"one," he writes, "so universally despised as I am. Lord 
Carlisle is very good to Charles, and Charles to me, to be so 
cheerful as they are in this dull place." " Harry," he says 
elsewhere, speaking of his youngest son, "will lose no learn- 
ing by being with Charles, instead of being at Eton. I am 
sure I am a great gainer by the latter's kind and cheerful stay 
here ; and if I were to go on expatiating upon his and Lord 

And ricling-school no more divert ; 
Newmarket does, for there j-ou flirt. 

But why does he no longer dream 
Of yellow Tiber and its shore ? 

Of his friend Charles's favorite scheme, 
On waking, think no more ?" 

1 Charles had called on Lord Bi-eadalbane to make inquiries about 
Nice, and brought Lord Holland back a most uninviting account. " The 
commandant, le Comte de Nangis, of a good family in Savoy, and his 
lady are very polite, and were extremely obliging to Lord and Lady 
Glenorchy. There is an assembly at his house every evening, consisting 
of from fifteen to twenty-five ladies, and men in proportion, where they 
play cards very low. There is no other meeting of company in the town, 
and consequently very little, or rather no, amusement. The lodgings are 
bad, with bare walls and brick floors, and there is certainly nothing to 
invite strangers thither but the air. The best house to be let is a new- 
built one in the square, but quite unfurnished." 



54 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. H. 

Carlisle's merits, I slionld never have done. Thej Lave, and 
promise, every agreeable and good quality ; and will not de- 
spise themselves, or be despised by other people, at least these 
forty years." Forty years from that time Charles Fox was in 
AVestminster Abbey, and Lord Carlisle was patiently submit- 
ting to the alternate praises and insults of his fiery 3'oung 
cousin: conduct for which Byron, when his arrogance had 
been corrected by the ex^^erience of a real sorrow, made mem- 
orable atonement in his noblest poem.* 

Early in 1768 Lord Carlisle set off upon a journey, the 
stages of which may be traced in his letters to George Selwyn 
— letters so good as to arouse a regret that the writet did not 
devote himself to a province of literature in which he might 
have been mentioned with "Walpole, instead of manufacturing 
poetry which it was flattery to compare with Koscommon's. 
Accompanied by Lord Kildare, he crossed the Alps in a style 
ver}^ different from that in which Englishmen of his age cross 
them now ; in a chair carried by six men, shuddering at every 
step, and tortured by apprehensions for the safety of his dog, 
which, bolder than himself, ventured now and then to look 
over the edge of a precipice. The scenery of a fine pass in- 
spired him with no ideas except those of horror and melan- 
choly ; and he never speaks of " beauties" until he is safe and 
w^arm in the Opera-houso at Turin." At Ge«oa he met Charles 
Fox, who, like a good son, had stayed at Nice till the last mo- 
ment ; and the three friends went by Piacenza, Parma, and 
Bologna to Florence, and thence to Rome. The history of their 
proceedings may be read in the fourth book of the " Dunciad." 
Lads of eighteen and nineteen, who had been their own mas- 
ters almost since they could remember; bearing names that 
were a passport to any circle; with unimpaired health, and a 
credit at their banker's which they were not yet old enough 
to have exhausted, made their grand tour after much the 



^ " Cbilde Harold," canto iii., stanzas xxix. and xxx. 

=* Three years previously to tliis, Wilkes pronounces the Apennines to 
be "not near so high nor so horrid as the Alps. On the Alps you see 
very few tolerable sjDots." 



1749-GS.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 55 

same fashion at all periods of the eighteenth century ; and it 
is unnecessary to repeat what Pope has told in a manner that 
surpasses himself. Travelling with eight servants apiece; 
noticed by queens ; treated as equals by ambassadors ; losing 
their hearts in one palace and their money in another, and yet, 
on the wdiole, getting into less mischief in high society than 
when left to their own devices, they 

" sauntered Europe round, 
And gathered every vice on Christian ground ; 
Saw every court ; heard every king declare 
His royal sense of operas or the fair; 
Tried all hors-d'oeuvres, all liqxieurs defined, 
Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined." ' 

Fox threw into his follies a vivacity and an originality which 
were meant for better things. Looking forward to tlie day 
when, as arbiter of dress, he was to lead the taste of the town 
through all stages from coxcombry to slovenliness, he spared 
no pains to equip himself for the exercise of his lofty func- 
tions. He tried upon Italian dandies the effect of tlie queer 
little French hat and the red heels with which he designed 
to astonish his brother-macaronies of St. James's Street ; and, 
before he and his friend left the Continent, the pair of scape- 

* The memoirs of last century swarm with proofs that young English- 
men of family were only too well received in Continental, and most of all 
in Italian, drawing-rooms. The nobleman who, rather by contrast to the 
others of his name than for any exceptionally heinous misdoings of his 
own, goes liy the sobriquet of" the bad Lord Lyttelton," dated his moral 
ruin from his grand tour, when he fought two duels and found the wom- 
en " all Armidas." It might have been thought that young George Gren- 
ville's report of his experiences at Naples in the year 1774 was over-col- 
ored, if it had been addressed to any less respectable corresijondent than 
Lord Temple. A nejihew may be trusted to say the best for the society 
in which he lives when writing to an uncle by whose aid he expects to 
come into Parliament. At Vienna, Grenville complains that very few 
ladies of rank would allow him the honor of their acquaintance without 
insisting on his purchasing it at the loo-table — a condition which would 
not have stood much in the way of Charles Fox or Lord Carlisle, whose 
confidences to George Selwyn are such as irresistibly to suggest a wish 
that they were both back at Eton in the hands of a head-master who 
knew his duty, 



56 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

graces drove post all the way from Paris to Lyons in order 
to select patterns for their embroidered waistcoats. 

In one respect Fox did not resemble Pope's hero. Unlike 
the youth who 

"Spoiled his own language and acquired no more," 

he came back from the Continent an excellent linguist, and a 
better English scholar than ever. lie was fairly contented 
with the knowledge which, as the fruit of his industry at Ox- 
ford, he had obtained of Greek and Latin ; and his standard was 
not a low one. He bade Virgil and Euripides lie by till such 
time as he could read them again with something of the pleas- 
ure of novelty ; and from the day that he landed at Genoa 
he flung himself into the delights of Italian literature with all 
the vehemence of his ardent nature. " For God's sake," he 
wrote to his friend Fitzpatrick, " learn Italian as fast as you 
can, to read Ariosto. There is more good poetry in Italian 
than in all other languages I understand put together. Make 
liaste and read all these things, that you may be fit to talk to 
Christians." Every moment that could be spared from gam- 
ing and flirting he spent in devouring Dante and Ariosto, or 
in drudging his way through Guicciardini and Davila. He 
had a student's instinct for getting at the heart of a language. 
Like other men who look forward to reading with their knees 
in the fire or with their elbows in the grass, he knew that he 
must begin with the dictionary and the exercise-book. While 
a boy, he had as much French as most diplomatists would think 
sufiicient for a lifetime. Lord Holland has preserved a copy 
of verses written by Charles at Eton which, in three years 
out of four, would still win him the prize in French composi- 
tion at any of our public schools.' But he was dissatisfied 

' When, in after-days, these verses were brought to the notice of Fox, 
he spoke of them as worthless. " I did not," he said, " at that time know 
the rules of French versification." The subject, indeed, of the lines was 
not likely to i:)lease many besides his father; for they consist in a eu- 
logy on the " digne citoyeu" Lord Bute at the expense of Chatham, who 
is denounced as " un fourbe orateur," the idol and tyrant of a land which 
the poet blushes to call his country. 



1749-G8.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 57 

with his own proficiencj. " As to French," he says, " I am 
far from being so thorough a master of it as I could wish ; but 
I know so much of it that I could perfect myself at any time 
with very little trouble, especially if I pass three or four months 
in France." First and last, he passed a great deal more than 
three or four months in that seductive country, and few be- 
sides himself would have spoken slightingly of the trouble 
which he bestowed on the task of acquiring its language. He 
adopted the useful custom of writing from France in French 
to the friends with whom he could take that liberty. Much 
of what he had to say he put into the shape of verses, over 
the construction of which he must have expended no small 
labor ; and any error in rhyme or prosody which he suspected 
himself of having committed in a letter that had been al- 
ready despatched he took care to point out and amend in the 
next. His exertions were not thrown away. None ever found 
fault with his French except Napoleon, the purity of whose 
own accent was by no means above criticism. When Fox re- 
visited Paris after the Peace of Amiens, the survivors of the 
eighteenth-century societ}', who were venturing once more to 
show themselves in their old haunts, were astonished by the 
spirit and correctness with which he reproduced the phraseolo- 
gy in which President Ilenault talked to Madame du Deffand 
and the Duchesse de la Yalliere in the days before the guil- 
lotine had been heard of. 
// There are some who apparently study the liistories of dis- 
tinguished men in order to find illustrations of the theory 
that fame in after-life does not necessarily depend upon habits 
of work formed betimes and persistently maintained. Read- 
ers of this class will derive even less than their usual consola- 
tion and encouragement from the career of Fox. The third 
Lord Holland, who knew his uncle far better than all other 
people together who have recorded their impressions of his 
character, tells us that the most marked and enduring feature 
in his disposition was his invincible propensity " to labor at 
excellence." His rule in small things, as in great, was the 
homely proverb that what is worth doing at all is worth doing 
well. His verses of society were polished with a care which 



58 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. II. 

tlieir merit not unfrequently repaid. He ranked high among 
chess-phijers, and was constantly and eagerly extending his 
researches into the science of the game. When secretary of 
state, he did something to improve his hand by taking lessons, 
and writing copies like a schoolboy. At the head of his own 
table, he helped the tnrbot and the fowls according to the di- 
rections of a treatise on carving which lay beside him on the 
cloth. As soon as he had finally determined to settle in the 
country, he devoted, himself to the art of gardening with a 
success to which St. Anne's Hill still bears agreeable testi- 
mony. He could hold his own at tennis after he was well on 
in years and of a bulk proportioned to his weight in the bal- 
ance of political power ; and when an admiring spectator 
asked him how he contrived to return so many of the difficult 
balls, " It is," he replied, " because I am a very painstaking 
man." "Whatever hand or mind or tongue found to do, he 
did it with his might ; and. he had his reward ; for the prac- 
tice of working at the top of his forces became so much a part 
of his nature that he was never at a loss when the occasion 
demanded a sudden and exceptional effort. A young senator, 
who feels that he has it in him, eagerly asks to be told the 
secret of eloquence ; and veterans can give him no better re- 
ceipt than the humble advice, whatever he is about, always to 
do his utmost.' It is said that armies can be disciplined to 
such a point that the soldier will find the battle-field a relaxa- 
tion from the hardships and restraints of the drill-ground ; 
and the orator who, when taken unawares, retorts upon his 



^ The collection of aphorisms which Mr. Ruskin composed for the in- 
struction of a young Italian painter may be studied with benefit by as- 
pirants in oratory. "Stop," says Mr. Ruskin, "the moment you feel a 
difficulty, and your drawing will be the best you can do, but you will 
not be able to do another so good to-morrow. Put your full strength 
out the moment you feel a difficulty, and you will spoil your drawing 
to-day, but you will do better than your to-day's best to-morrow." The 
processes of true art are much the same in all its branches. A public 
speaker may learn more from Herr Klesmer's discourse in " Daniel De- 
ronda" on the training of a public performer than from twenty i)rofessed 
treatises on rhetoric. 



1749-68.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 59 

assailant with a shower of sentences so apt that they might 
each have been coined for the pnrjDose of the moment has 
purchased his enviable gift bj many an hour of nnseen and 
apparently objectless labor, which few among his audience, 
even with such a prize in prospect, could ever prevail upon 
themselves to undertake. 

In August, 1768, Fox waited upon Yoltaire at his villa by 
the Lake of Geneva. The old man was very gracious, treated 
his guest to chocolate, and did him the easy favor of pointing 
out some of his own writings which had a tendency to coun- 
teract the influence of religious prejudice. " Yoila," said the 
patriarch, " des livres dont il faut se munir." ' Charles had 
just then very little attention to spare for theological contro- 
versy, even in the enticing guise which it assumes in the 
"Ingenu" and the "Philosophical Dictionary." With his 
head full of politics, he was proceeding homewards to com- 
mence the business of his life. The world in which he found 
himself on his arrival in England differed so essentially from 
our own that it would be a gross injustice to the memory of 
Fox if I were to plunge into the narrative of his actions 
without previously describing, to the best of my power, the 
society in wdiich he moved, the moral atmosphere which he 
breathed, and the temptations by "U'hich he was assailed. 
Never was there a man whose faults were so largely those 
of his time; while his eminent merits, and enormous services 
to the country, were so peculiarly his own. When we com- 
pare the state of public life as he entered it and as he left it, 
and when we reflect how preponderating a share he cheer- 
fully bore in the gigantic labors and sacrifices by which a 
change for the better was gradually and jDainfully secured. 



' Fox took other opportunities of improving bis acquaintance with 
Voltaire, who acknowledged his next visit in a letter to Lord Holland, 
the first sentences of which run thus : " Y"" son is an English lad, and j 
an old frenchman. He is healthy, and j sick. Yet j love him with all 
my heart, not only for his fether, but for him self" On tiiis occasion 
Voltaire gave Charles a dinner in his " little caban," where the young 
man was soon privileged to come and go at will. 



60 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. H. 

we shall confess that, besides his unquestioned title to an 
affection which, after the lapse of three quarters of a cen- 
tury, is still rather personal than historical, he has a claim 
to our unstinted gratitude, and to no scanty measure of 
esteem. 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 61 



CHAPTER III. 

London Society at the Time tliat Fox entered the Great World. — Its 
Narrow Limits and Agreeable Cliaracter. — Prevalent Dissipation 
and Frivolity. — The Duke of Grafton. — Kigby. — Lord Weymouth. — 
Lord Sandwich. — Fox in the Inner Circle of Fashion. — Lord March. — 
Brooks's Club. — Gaming. — Extravagance. — Drinking and Gout. — 
George the Third's Temperate and Hardy Habits. — State of Religion 
among the Upper Classes. — Political Life in 1768. — Sinecures. — Pen- 
sions and Places, English, Irish, and Colonial. — Other Forms of Cor- 
ruption. — The Venality of Parliament. — Low Morality of Public Men, 
and Discontent of the Nation. — Office and Oi^jiosition. — Fox's Political 
Teachers. 

Moral considerations apart, no more desirable lot can well 
be imagined for a human being than that lie should be in- 
cluded in the ranks of a highly civilized aristocracy at the 
culminating moment of its vigor. A society so broad and 
strongly based that within its own borders it can safely per- 
mit absolute liberty of thought and speech ; whose members 
are so numerous that they are able to believe, with some 
show of reason, that the interests of the State are identical 
with their own, and at the same time so privileged that they 
are sure to get the best of everything which is to be had, is 
a society uniting, as far as those members are concerned, 
most of the advantages and all the attractions both of a pop- 
ular and an oligarchical form of government. It is in such 
societies that existence has been enjoyed most keenly, and 
that books have been written which communicate a sense of 
that enjoyment most vividly to posterity. The records of 
other periods may do more to illustrate the w^orking of po- 
litical forces and to clear up the problems of historical sci- 
ence ; the literature of other periods may be richer in wealth 
of thought and nobler in depth of feeling; but a student 
who loves to dwell upon times when men lived so intensely 
and wrote so joyously that their past seems to us as our 



62 THE EAELY IIISTOIIY OF [Chap. III. 

present will never tire of recurring to the Athens of Alcibi- 
ades and Aristophanes, the Rome of Mark' Antony and Cic- 
ero, and the London of Charles Townshend and Horace 
Walpole. The special charm of the literature produced in 
communities so constituted is that in those communities, and 
in those alone, jDersonal allusion, the most effective weapon 
in the armory of letters, can be employed with a certainty of 
success. A few thousand people who thought that the world 
was made for them, and that all outside their own fraternity 
were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each 
other an amount of attention quite inconceivable to us who 
count our equals by millions. The actions, the fortunes, and 
the peculiarities of every one who belonged to the ruling 
class became matters of such importance to his fellows that 
satire and gossip were elevated into branches of the highest 
literary art. Every hit in an Athenian burlesque was rec- 
ognized on the instant by every individual in an audience 
which comprised the whole body of free-born citizens. The 
names and habits of every parasite and informer and legacy- 
hunter within the circuit of the Seven Hills were accurately 
known to every Roman who had enough spare sesterces to 
purchase a manuscript of Juvenal. In the eighteenth cen- 
tury, in our own country, the same causes produced the same 
results ; and the flavor of the immortal impertinences which 
two thousand years before were directed against Pericles and 
Euripides may be recognized in the letters which, w^lien 
George the Third was young, were handed about among a 
knot of men of fashion and family who conld never have 
enough of discussing the characters and ambitions, the in- 
comes and genealogies, the scrapes and the gallantries, of 
everybody who had admission to the circle within which 
their lives were passed. 

The society pictured in these letters had much the same rela- 
tion to what is called good society now that the " Boar Hunt" 
by Yelasquez, in the National Gallery, with its groups of 
stately cavaliers, courteous to each other, and unmindful of 
all besides, bears to the scene of confused bustle and dubious 
enjoyment represented in the "Derby Day " of Mr. Frith. So 



Chap. HI.] CHARLES JiVMES FOX. 63 

far from being a vast and ill-defined region, capable of almost 
infinite expansion, into which anybody can work his way who 
has a little money and a great deal of leisure, and who is will- 
ing to invest his industry in the nndertaking, good society, 
when Lord Chesterfield was its oracle and George Selwyn its 
father-confessor, was enclosed within ascertained and narrow 
boundaries. The extent of those boundaries was so familiar 
to all who were admitted and all who were excluded that a 
great lady, when she gave an evening-party, would content 
herself with sending cards to the women, while she left the 
men to judge for .themselves whether they had a right to 
come, or not. Within the charmed precincts there prevailed 
an easy and natnral mode of intercourse which in some re- 
spects must have been singularly delightful. Secure of his 
own position, and with no desire to contest the social claims 
of others, a man was satisfied, and sometimes only too easily 
satisfied, to show himself exactly as he was. There was no 
use in trying to impose uj)on people who had been his school- 
fellows at Eton, his brother - officers in the Guards, his col- 
leagues in Parliament, his partners at whist, his cronies at the 
club, his companions in a hundred revels. Every friend with 
whom he lived w^as acquainted with every circumstance in his 
career and every turn in his affairs — who had jilted him, and 
who had schemed for him ; how many thousands a year had 
been allowed him by liis father, and how many hundreds he 
allowed his son ; how much of his rent-roll was unmortgaged, 
and how much wood w\as left uncut in his plantations ; what 
chance he had of getting heard at two in the morning in the 
House of Commons, and what influence he possessed over the 
corporation of his neighboring borough. Unable to dazzle 
those for whose good opinion he cared, it only remained for 
him to amuse them; and the light and elegant effusions in 
which the fine gentlemen of White's and Arthur's rivalled, 
and, as some think, excelled, the wittiest pens of France re- 
main to prove of what Englishmen are capable when they de- 
vote the best of their energy to the business of being frivo- 
lous. 

The frivolity of the last century was not confined to the 



64 "the early history of [Chap. hi. 

youthful, the foolish, or even to the idle. There never will 
be a generation which cannot supply a parallel to the lads 
who, in order that they might the better hear the nonsense 
which they were talking across a tavern table, had Pall Mall 
laid down with straw at the cost of fifty shillings a head for 
the party ; or to the younger brother who gave half a guinea 
every morning to the flower-woman who brought him a nose- 
gay of roses for his button -hole.* These follies are of all 
times; but what was peculiar to the period when Charles Fox 
took his seat in Parliament and his place in society consisted 
in the phenomenon (for to our ideas it is nothing else) that 
men of age and standing, of strong mental powers and refined 
cultivation, lived openly, shamelessly, and habitually, in the 
face of all England, as no one who had any care for his repu- 
tation would now live during a single fortnight of the year at 
Monaco. As a sequel to such home-teaching as Lord Holland 
was qualified to impart, the young fellow, on his entrance into 
the great world, was called upon to shape his life according 
to the models that the public opinion of the day held up for 
his imitation ; and the examples which he saw around him 
would have tempted cooler blood than his, and turned even a 
more tranquil brain. The ministers who guided the State, 
whom the king delighted to honor, who had the charge of 
public decency and order, who named the fathers of the 
Church, whose duty it was (to use the words of their mon- 
arch) " to prevent any alterations in so essential a part of the 
Constitution as everything that relates to religion," ^ were con- 
spicuous for impudent vice, for daily dissipation, for pranks 
which would have been regarded as childish and unbecoming 
by the cornets of a crack cavalry regiment in the worst days 
of military license. The Duke of Grafton flaunted at Ascot 
races with a mistress whom he had picked up in the street, 
and paraded her at the opera when the royal party were in 
their box.^ So public an outrage on the part of the first ser- 



1 Walpole to Mann, September 9, 1771 ; May 6, 1770. 

"^ The king to Lord North, April 2, 1773. 

^ Junius has made the Duke of Grafton and Miss Nancy Parsons ahnost 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. G5 

vant of the crown roused a momentarj indignation even in 
liardened minds. '* Libertine men," writes an active politician 
in April, 1768, " are as much offended as prudish women ; and 
it is impossible he should think of remaining minister." But 
George the Third was willing that the Duke of Grafton 
should bring whom he pleased under the same roof as the 
queen, so long as he kept such people as Rockingham and 
Burke and Richmond out of the cabinet. Where the king 
gave his confidence, it was not for his subjects to play the 
Puritan, or, at any rate, for those among his subjects who lived 
upon the good graces of the prime-minister; and in the fol- 
lowing August, when Miss Parsons showed herself at the 
Ridotto, she was followed about by as large a crowd as ever 
of smart gentlemen who wanted commissionerships for them- 
selves and deaneries for their younger brothers.' 

In point of both the lesser and the greater morals there was 
little to choose between the head of the government and his 
subordinates. The paymaster of the forces was Rigby, a man 
of whom it may be literally said that the only merit he pos- 
sessed, or cared to claim, was that he drank fair. This virtue 
had stood him in good stead when secretary to the Duke of 
Bedford in Ireland, to whom he was invaluable for the skill 
with which he conducted the operation of washing away dis- 
affection in floods of the viceregal claret. He took care to 
keep the lord-lieutenant informed of the zeal which he ex- 
pended on this important service. " We liked each other," 
he writes on one such occasion, "well enough not to part till 
three in the morning; long before which time the company 
was reduced to a tete-d-tete, except one other, drunk and asleep 
in the corner of the room." Rigby, however, in the matter 
of sobriety, did not observe what Burke calls " the morality 
of geography." As he drank at Dublin, so he drank in Lon- 

as famous as Antony and Cleopatra ; but the most discreditable features 
of the story are known by the casual and somewhat contemptuous com- 
ments of a number of men who socially were the prime-minister's equals, 
and who had no sufficient motive, political or personal, for depicting him 
to each other as worse than he was. 

' Mr. Whately to Mr. Greuville, April 22 and August 24, 1708. 

5 



QQ THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Cuap. III. 

don, and as lie drank in London, so he drank in the conntrj. 
A letter of Garrick's almost implies that the paymaster fixed 
his residence among the swamps of Essex in order that he 
might have an excuse for using brandy as the rest of the 
world used small-beer. With no lack of mother-wit, and pre- 
pared, according to the character of his company, to please by 
the coarsest jollity or the most insinuating good-breeding, he 
was a dangerous guide to the sons and nepliews of his own 
contemporaries. When he first appeared as a man about town, 
he was detected as having been at the bottom of at least one 
discreditable frolic ;' and he did not improve with years. At 
the Pay-ofiice, in which paradise of jobbery he contrived to 
settle himself as a permanent occupant, he kept open house 
for the members of several successive administrations, accord- 
ing to his own notions of what open house should mean. But 
the cup of his excesses, to employ a metaphor which he would 
have appreciated, was at length full ; and he lived to learn, in 
impoverishment and disgrace, that a purer generation had 
drawn somewhat tighter than in the halcyon days of Lord 
Holland the limits within which public money might be 
diverted to the maintenance of private debauchery. 

When the Duke of Grafton was at the Treasury, the seals 
were held by Lord Weymouth, the son of Earl Granville's 
daughter. With more than his grandfather's capacity for 
liquor, he had inherited a fair portion of his abilities; and 
anybody who cared to sit up with the secretary of state till 

' Sir Charles Hanbury Williams gave George Selwyn a sad account of 
a young Hobart, whom the latter was trying to keep out of mischief. 
" The moment your back was turned he flew out ; went to Lady Tanker- 
ville's drum-major, having unfortunately dined that day with Rigby, 
who plied his head witli too many bumpers, and also made him a pres- 
ent of some Chinese crackers. Armed in this manner, he entered the as- 
sembly, gave a string of four-and-twenty crackers to Lady Lucy Clinton, 
and bid her put it in the caudle, which she very innocently did. When 
the first went oflF, she threw the rest on the tea-table, where, one after an- 
other, they all went off, with much noise and not a little stink. Lady 
Lucy was very plentifully abused, and Mr. Hobart had his share. Few 
women will courtesy to him, and I question if he'll ever lead anybody to 
their chair ajjaiu as long as he lives." 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 07 

the hours were no longer small might obtain a fair notion 
how Carteret used to talk towards the end of his second bot- 
tle. It would have been well for Lord Weymouth if his 
nights had been consumed exclusively in drinking, for he 
was an ardent and most unlucky gambler, and by the age of 
one-and-thirty he had played away his fortune, his credit, and 
his honor. His house swarmed with bailiffs ; and when he 
sought refuge at the club, he found himself among people 
whose money he had tried to win without having any of his 
own to lose, and who had told him their opinion of his con- 
duct in terms which he was not in a position, and (as some 
suspected) not of a nature, to resent. He was on the point of 
levanting for France when, as a last resource, his grandfa- 
ther's friends bethought them that he had not yet tried pub- 
lic life. "He must have bread, my lord," wrote Junius; 
" or, rather, he must have wine ;" and, as it was convenient 
that his first services to the State should be rendered at a 
distance from the scene of his earlier exploits, he was ap- 
pointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. The Dublin tradesmen, 
however, did not relish the prospect of having a bankrupt 
nobleman quartered upon them for five or six years, in order 
that at the end of that time he might be able to show his 
face again at "White's. The spirit which, fifty years before, 
had refused to put up witli the bad halfpence of the domi- 
nant country again began to show itself ; Lord Weymouth's 
nomination was rescinded ; and, to console him for the rebuff, 
he was made Secretary of State for the Northern Depart- 
ment, and intrusted with half the work that is now done by 
the Foreign Office, and with the undivided charge of the in- 
ternal administration of the kingdom. He did not pay his 
new duties the compliment of making the very slightest al- 
teration in his habits. He still boozed till daylight, and dozed 
into the afternoon ; and his public exertions were confined to 
occasional speeches, which his admirers extolled as preternat- 
urally sagacious, and which his severest critics admitted to be 
pithy. "If I paid nobody," wrote AValpole, " and went drunk 
to bed every morning at six, I might expect to be called out 
of bed by two in the afternoon to save the nation and gov- 



68 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

eni tlie House of Lords by two or three sentences as pro- 
found and short as the proverbs of Solomon." 

Lord Weymouth's successor as secretary of state was the 
most eminent, and possibly the most disreputable, member of 
the Bedford connection. The Earl of Sandwich was excellent 
as the chief of a department. lie rose about the time that 
his predecessor retired to rest, and remained, till what then 
was a late dinner-hour, closely absorbed in methodical and 
most effectual labor. " Sandwich's industry to carry a point 
in view," says Walpole, " was so remarkable that the world 
mistook it for abilities ;" and if genius has been rightly de- 
fined as the capability of taking trouble, the world was not 
far wrong. Like all great administrators, he loved his own 
way, and rarely failed to get it ; but outside the walls of his 
office his way was seldom or never a good one. He shocked 
even his own generation by the immorality of his private 
life, if such a term can be applied to the undisguised and un- 
abashed libertinism that he carried to the very verge of a 
tomb which did not close on him until he had misspent three 
quarters of a century. He survived a whole succession of 
scandals, the least flagrant of which would have been fatal to 
any one but him. Nothing substantially injured him in the 
estimation of his countrymen, because no possible revelation 
could make them think worse of him than they thought al- 
ready. "When he was advanced in age, and at the head of 
what was just then the most important branch of the public 
service, he was involved in one of those tragedies of the po- 
lice-court by means of which the retribution of publicity 
sometimes overtakes the voluptuary who imagines that his 
wealth has fenced him securely from the consequences of his 
sin. But no coroner's inquest, or cross-examination at the 
Old Bailey, could elicit anything which would add a shade to 
such a character. The blood had been washed from the steps 
of the theatre ; the gallows had been erected and taken down ; 
the poor creature who had been the object of a murderous rival- 
ry was quiet in her grave;' and the noble earl was still at the 

^ " The poor assassin was executed yesterday. The same day Charles 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX, G9 

Admiralty, giving his iinlionored name to the discoveries of 
our most celebrated navigator, and fitting out expeditions 
which might reduce the Puritans of New England and the 
Quakers of Philadelphia, to the necessity of contributing to 
the taxes out of wliich he replenished his cellar and his se- 
raglio. Corrupt, tyrannical, and brazen-faced as a politician, 
and destitute, as was seen in his conduct to Wilkes, of that 
last relic of virtue, fidelity towards the partners of his secret 
and pleasant vices, political satire itself tried in vain to exag- 
gerate the turpitude of Sandwich. 

" Too infiimous to have a friend ; 
Too bad for bad men to commend, 
Or good to name ; beneath whose weight 
Earth groans ; who hath been spared by fate 
Only to show, on mercy's plan, 
How far and long God bears with man." 

Even this masterpiece of truculence was no libel upon one 
who had still eight-and-twenty years to pass in living up to 
the character wliich Churchill had given him in his wrath. 

" Such," cried Junius, " is the council by whicli the best of 
sovereigns is advised, and the greatest nation upon earth gov- 
erned." ' The humiliation and resentment with which decent 
Eno;lishmen saw this train of Bacchanals scourino' throue^h the 
high places of tlie State is a key to the unexampled popular- 
ity of that writer who, under twenty different signatures 
drawn from tlie pages of Plutarch and Tacitus, lashed tlie 
self-will and self-delusion of tlie king, and the rapacity and 
dissoluteness of his ministers. The spectacle of " the Duke 
of Grafton, like an apprentice, thinking that the world should 
be postponed to a horse-race, and the Bedfords not caring 
what disgraces we undergo, w^hile each of them has three 
thousand pounds a year and three thousand bottles of claret 

Fox moved for the removal of Lord Sandwich, but was beaten by a large 
majority; for in Parliament the ministers can still gain victories" (Wal- 
pole to Mann, April 20, 1779). 

* The letter containing this sentence is signed " Atticus ;" but it was 
published among the works of Junius, and is indisputably from his pen. 



70 THE EARLY HISTORVT OF [Chap. III. 

and cLampagne," ' did more than his own somewhat grandiose 
eloquence and over-Labored sarcasm to endow Junius with a 
power in the country second only to that of Chatham, and a 
fame hardly less miiversal than the notoriety of Wilkes. But 
in the eyes of George the Third the righteous anger of his 
people was only another form of disloyalty. Intent, heart and 
soul, on his favorite scheme for establishing a system of per- 
sonal rule, under which all the threads of administration 
should centre in the royal closet, he entertained an instinc- 
tive antipathy to high-minded and independent men of all 
political parties. He selected his instruments among those 
who were willing to be subservient because they had no self- 
respect to lose. " Ilis Majesty," wrote Burke, " never was in 
better spirits. lie has got a ministry weak and dependent; 
and, what is better, willing to continue so." ^ Serenely satis- 
fied with his success in weeding out of the government every- 
body whom the nation trusted and esteemed, he felt it an in- 
sult to himself that his subjects should murmur when they 
saw honest and patriotic statesmen forbidden to devote their 
talents to the service of the public, while the prosperity and 
honor of the country were committed to the charge of men 
not one of whom any private person in his senses would 
choose as a steward or receive as a son-in-law. According to 
his Majesty's theory, his favor was a testimonial which the 
world was bound to accept. The royal confidence could turn 
Sir Francis Dashwood into a sage and Lord George Sackville 
into a hero ; could make a Cato the censor of the Earl of 
Sandwich, and a Scipio of the Duke of Grafton. Among the 
innumerable evil results of George the Third's policy, not 
the least disastrous was that the supporters of that policy con- 
sidered themselves bound to maintain that men like Lord 
"Weymouth and Rigby were no worse than men like the Duke 
,of Richmond and the Marquis of Rockingham. Personal mo- 
rality became a party question ; the standard of virtue was 



* Walpole to Conway, June IG, 17G8. The allusion to the Duke of 
Grafton has been softened by the omission of three words. 
^ Burke to the Marquis of Rockingham, August 1, 1767. 



Chap. III.] CIIAliLES JAMES FOX. 71 

lowered to meet the convenience of the court ; and wlioever 
was desirous of evincing his attachment to the king was in a 
hurry to assure mankind that he condoned the vices of tlie 
minister. 

It must liave been an edifying lesson in ethics for tlie Cam- 
bridge undergraduates when the Earl of Sandwich put him- 
self up for the high-stewardship of their university, within 
six weeks of the time that his initiation into the oi'gies and 
blasphemies of Medmenham Abbey had become matter for 
comment throughout the lengtli and breadth of England.' 
The post had been vacated by the death of Lord Hardwicke ; 
and, scandalized by the prospect of such a successor to an of- 
fice which his father had dignified, the deceased nobleman's 
eldest son announced himself as a rival candidate. The more 
respectable masters of arts declared their preference for a peer 
whose literary tastes and exemplary conduct fairly entitled 
him to an academical compliment, and asked each other what 
single qualification his opponent possessed which could recom- 
mend him to the suif rages of a corporate body pledged to the 
encouragement of religious education. Gray, in a very supe- 
rior specimen of that class of pasquinades whicli a hot con- 
test at the university never fails to produce, endeavored to es- 
tablish a connection between the Earl of Sandwich and Bibli- 



' Medmenham Abbey, formerly a convent of Cistercian monks, was a 
ruin finely situated on the Thames, near Marlow. A society of dissij^ated 
men of ftxshion who dubbed themselves "The Franciscans," after their 
founder. Sir Francis Dashwood, repaired and fitted up the buildings and 
laid out the grounds as a retreat where they might indulge with imiDU- 
nity in their peculiar notions of enjoyment. Little is known with certain- 
ty about their proceedings ; but that little is more than enough. Selwyn, 
as an undergraduate, was expelled from Oxford with every mark of ig- 
nominy for an act of profane buffoonery which, in an aggravated form, 
was performed niglitly at Medmenham by the Chancellor of the Excheq- 
uer for the amusement of a circle of privj'-councillors and members of 
Parliament. The door of the abbey may still be seen surmounted by 
the motto "Fay ce que voudras." The other inscriptions which dis- 
graced the natural beauty of the groves and gardens survive only in 
books which fortunately no one, except an historian, is under any obli- 
gation to consult. 



72 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. lU. 

cal theology, on the ground that a precedent for most of his 
vices could be found in the history of one or another of the 
patriarchs. But Lord Hardwicke's adherents soon found that 
the matter was beyond a joke. Sandwich, who was the most 
consummate electioneerer of the day, left his character to 
take care of itself, and applied all his activity and experience 
to the familiar business of getting votes. He bribed ; he 
promised ; he canvassed every country clergyman who had 
kept his name on the books. He wrote fawning letters to 
men of his own rank, begging them to exert their inliuence 
over their private chaplains and the incumbents and expect- 
ants of the livings which were in their gift. He fetched one 
voter out of a mad-house, and anotlier all the way from the 
Isle of Man ; and such were the ill-feeling and confusion which 
he created in university society that his own cousins, who had 
gone down from London to do what they could for him among 
their college acquaintances, freely expressed their disgust at 
finding the Cambridge senate treated like a constituency of 
potwallopers. When the poll closed, both sides claimed a 
majority of one. The undergraduates, who were for Lord 
Hardwicke to a man, burst into the senate-house, elected one 
of their own number high steward, and chaired him as the 
representative of their favorite ; and when, in the course of 
the next month, Sandwich dined with the fellows of Trinity, 
the students rose from their seats and cpntted tlie hall in a 
body as soon as lie had taken his place at the high table. But 
the self-seeking and sycophancy of their elders and instructors 
were proof against any conceivable rebuke. Four years after- 
wards, at a time when the Duke of Grafton was at once the 
greatest dispenser of patronage and the most notorious evil 
liver in the kingdom, the chancellorship of Cambridge hap- 
pened to fall vacant ; and the young prime-minister was select- 
ed to preside over a university whicli, if he had been in statu 
pupillari., the proctors would soon have made too hot to hold 
him. Well might Junius congratulate his grace on his ami- 
cable relations with "that seat of learning which, in contem- 
plation of the system of your life, the comparative purity of 
your manners with those of your high steward, and a thousand 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 73 

other recoinmending circumstances, lias cLosen you to encour- 
age the growing virtue of their youth and to preside over 
their education." ' 

There is no form of personal example more sure to be ob- 
served and copied than that which a political leader presents 
to the younger portion of his followers ; and it may well be 
believed that Charles Fox, entering public life at an age when 
in our generation he would still be a freshman at college, was 
not likely to get much good by studying the patterns in fash- 
ion among the party to which Lord Holland ordained that 
he should belong. Youth as he was, and absolutely in the 

' The Duke of Grafton was chosen Chancellor of Cambridge in July, 
1769. Gray stooped to compose the words of an ode which was per- 
formed at the installation. A comparison between this production and 
his squib on Lord Sandwich goes far to bear out the dictum of his old 
pupil, Horace Walpole, that Gray's natural turn was for " things of hu- 
mor." It is melancholy to find the author of" The Bard " invoking all 
the heroes and benefactors of the university — Milton, Newton, 

" Great Edward with the lilies on his brow 
From haughty Gallia torn," 

" sad Chatillon and princely Clare," and '' either Henry," 

" The murdered saint, ancl the majestic lord 
That broke the bonds of Rome," 

to welcome a nobleman who would liave found himself much more at 
home with Poius and Pistol and Mrs. Quickly than in the august com- 
pany which the poet provided for him. The very depth of incongruity 
was sounded in the passage, 

" Hence avaunt — 'tis holy ground — 
Comus and his midnight crew !" 

An injunction which, if obeyed, would have prevented most of the prime- 
minister's colleagues from being present at the installation of their chief 
It was long before Gray heard the last of his ode, every line of which ap- 
peared to be written with a view to parody. The wits of the Opposition 
took special delight in illustrating his assertion that the muse 

" No vulgar praise, no venal incense, flings," 

by reminding the world that the Duke of Grafton had appointed him 
professor of history at Cambridge in the course of the previous twelve- 
month. 



7-1 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IIL 

hands of a parent wliose fascinating manners aided and dis- 
guised an uncommon force of will, and to whom every corner 
of the great world was intimately known, he had little choice 
in this or in any other vital matter. His bench in Parlia- 
ment was ready for him, and his niche in society. Few have 
had the downward path made smoother before them, or strewn 
with brighter flowers and more deadly berries. He was re- 
ceived with open arms by all that was most select and least 
censorious in London. Those barriers that divide the outer 
court from the inner sanctum— barriers within which Burke 
and Sheridan never stepped, and which his own father with 
difficulty surmounted — did not exist for him. Like Byron, 
Fox had no occasion to seek admission into what is called the 
highest circle, but was part of it from the first.' Instead of 
being tolerated by fine gentlemen, he was one of themselves 
— hand and glove with every noble rake who filled his pock- 
ets from the Exchequer and emptied them over the hazard- 
table ; and smiled on by all the dowagers and maids of honor 
as to the state of whose jointures and complexions our envoy 
at Florence was kept so regularly and minutely informed. It 
would be unchivalrous to revive tlie personal history of too 
many among the fair dames to whom, and about whom, Wal- 
pole indited his letters, even though a century has elapsed 
since they were laid elsewhere than in their husband's family 
vault.'' What were the morals of the bolder sex among Lord 
Holland's friends may be gathered from the correspondence 
of the Earl of March, in which a man past forty describes to 
a man of nearly fifty the life which, without affectation of 

' " I liked the dandies," said B^toii. " Tliey were always civil to me, 
though in general they disliked literary people. The truth is that, 
though I gave up tlie business early, 1 had a tinge of dandyism in my 
minority, and retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones." 

^ The foot-notes to Walpole's "Correspondence," and the short per- 
sonal histories in Selwyn's " Memoii's," leave on the mind of the reader 
an impression that, among the ladies of their set, the usual destiny was 
in France to be guillotined and in England to be divorced. "Augustus 
Hervey," writes Wal pole, " asked Lord Bolingbroke t'other day who was 
his proctor, as he would have asked for his tailor." 



Chap. III.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 75 

concealment, was led by j3ersons liigli in rank, rich in official 
employments, well seen at court, and to whom every door in 
Mayfair was as freely open as to young Lord Ilardwicke or 
old Lord Mansfield. March was in no sense one of those 
whom the gods loved. As Duke of Qneensberry, at nearer 
ninety than eighty years of age, lie was still rolling in wealth, 
still wallowing in sin, and regarded by his countrymen as one 
whom it was hardly decent to name, because he did not choose, 
out of respect for the public opinion of 1808, to discontinue a 
mode of existence which in 1768 was almost a thing of course 
among the men to whose care and guidance Lord Holland in- 
trusted the unformed character of his idolized boy.' 

What a mere boy he was when his father, as if ambitious 
of making him not less invulnerable to shame than himself, 
plunged him into the flood of town dissipation as suddenly 
and as completely as Achilles was dipped in Styx, may be 
judged by the date at which his name appears in the books 
of Brooks's. This societ}-, the most famous political club that 
will ever have existed in England — because, before any note- 
worthy rival was in the field, our politics had already out- 
grown St. James's Street — was not political in its origin. Li 
the first list of its members the Duke of Grafton and Lord 
Weymouth are shown side by side with the Duke of Rich- 
mond and the Duke of Portland.^ Brooks's took its rise from 

' The Duke of Qneensberry is the crucial instance among bad men, as 
Samuel Johnson is tlie crucial instance among the good, that the dread 
of the undiscovered future has no necessary connection -with the con- 
sciousness of an ill-si^ent life. Amidst a great deal in the received ac- 
count of his last days which may be charitably set down as fabulous, 
this much is clear, tliat he met death with well-bred indifference. 

" The rules of admission were evidently inspired by the caution of so- 
cial, and not political, prudence. The ballot took place between eleven 
at night and one in the morning ; a single black ball excluded ; and a 
member of Brooks's who joined any other club excejjt White's was at 
once struck off the books. The establishment was formed by one Almack, 
a wine-merchant, who was strictly enjoined to " sell no wines, that the 
club approves of, out of the house." Almack was soon succeeded by Mr. 
Brooks. The present house was built on the site of the old one in 1778, 
and not long afterwards Brooks, 



76 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

the inclination of men who moved in the same social orbit 
to live together more freely and familiarly than was compati- 
ble with the publicity of a coffee-house ; and how free and 
familiar was the life of marquises and cabinet ministers, when 
no one was there to watch them, the club rules most agreeably 
testify. Dinner was served at half-past four, and the bill was 
brought in at seven. Supper began at eleven and ended at 
half an hour after midnight. The cost of the dinner was 
eight shillings a head, and of the supper six; and any one 
who had been present during any part of the meal hours paid 
his share of the wine, in accordance with that old law of 
British conviviality which so long held good in the commer- 
cial room, and which has not yet died out from the bar mess. 
ISTo gaming was allowed over the decanters and glasses, " ex- 
cept tossing up for reckonings," under penalty of standing 
treat for the whole party ; and at cards or hazard no one 
might stake on credit, nor borrow from any of the players or 
bystanders. But with these regulations began and ended all 
the restraint which the club imposed, or affected to impose, 
upon the gambling propensities of its members. The rule 
about ready money was soon a dead letter ; and if ever a 
difficulty was made, Mr, Brooks, to his cost, was always at 
hand with the few hundred guineas which were required to 
spare any of his patrons the annoyance of leaving a well- 
placed chair at the faro-bank or a well-matched rubber of 
whist.' Gentlemen were welcome to go on losing as long as 

" Who, nursed in clubs, disdains a vulgar trade, 
Exults to trust, and blushes to be jjaid," 

retired from the management, and, not unnaturalh^, died poor. 

The managers of Brooks's have courteously permitted me to extract 
from the books of the club anj'thiug that bears upon the career and 
habits of its greatest member. 

* " I won four hundred pounds last night," wrote Fitzpatrick, " which 
was immediately appropriated to INIr. Martindale, to whom I still owe 
three hundred pounds; and I am in Brooks's books for twice that sum." 
Within the same ten pages of Selwyn's " Correspondence " are letters 
from two earls, one of whom relates how, in a moment of" cursed folly," 
he raised his account with Brooks from one hundred to five hundred 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 77 

the most sanguine of tlieir adversaries was willing to trust 
them; and when, at the age of sixteen, Charles Fox entered 
the club, which he was to render illustrious, he found himself 
surrounded with every facility for ruining himself with the 
least delay and in the best of company. 

If the habits of life which prevailed within the walls of 
Brooks's differed from those of the world outside, they did 
not differ for the worse. The men who swept np the gold 
and tilted out the dice on the old round-table in the draw- 
ing-room on M'hose broad and glistening surface the weekly 
journals now lie of an evening in innocent array, played 
more comfortably and more good-humoredly than elsewhere, 
but they did not play for higher stakes. Society in those 
days was one vast casino. On whatever pretext, and under 
whatever cii'cumstances, half a dozen people of fashion found 
themselves together — whether for music or dancing or pol- 
itics, or for drinking the w^aters' or each other's wine — the 
box was sure to be rattling, and the cards were being cut and 
slmffled. The passion for gambling was not weakened or di- 

pounds; while the other writes, " Having lost a very monstrous sum of 
money last night, if it is not very inconvenient to you, I should be glad 
of the money you owe me. If it is, I must pay what I can, and desire 
Brooks to trust me for the remainder." The scion of another noble house 
is immortalized in the club books by an entry which appears against his 
name, scrawled in the headlong indignation of some loser who had been 
balked of his revenge. "Having won only £12,000 during the last two 
months, retired in disgust, March 21, 1772; and that he may never re- 
turn is the ardent wish of members." 

' Bath had been a headquarters of gambling all through the reign of 
George the Second. "Were it not," wrote Lord Chesterfield, "for the 
comfort of returning health, I believe I should hang myself; I am so 
weary of sauntering- about without knowing what to do, or of playing at 
low play, which I hate, for the sake of avoiding high, which I love." 
Lord Chesterfield's receipt for prudence did not suit the more fervid 
temperament of Pulteney, one of whose jeremiads over his own losses 
concludes with a wish which would have gone home to Charles Fox. 
" On Friday next we leave this place — an unlucky one for me, for I have 
lost between five and six hundred pounds at it. Would it was to be paid, 
like the Jew's of Venice, with flesh instead of money ! I think I could 
spare some pounds of that without any detriment." 



78 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

verted by the rival attractions of female society ; for the 
surest road into the graces of a fine lady was to be known 
as one who betted freely and lost handsomely ; and too often 
it was no bar to a young fellow's advancement if he contrived 
to be short-sighted at a critical moment in the game, and was 
above having a long memory with regard to his nnpaid win- 
nings. It was next to impossible for a lad still in his teens 
to keep himself from the clutch of these elegant harpies, 
when men who were renowned as talkers in half the capitals 
of Europe complained that the eagerness of the women to 
levy blackmail on their friends and acquaintances was the de- 
struction of all pleasant and rational intercourse in London 
drawing-rooms. "The ladies," said Horace Walpole, "game 
too deep for me. The last time I was in town Lady Hert- 
ford wanted one, and I lost fifty-six guineas before I could 
say an Ave-Maria. I do not know a teaspoonful of news. 
I could tell you what was trumps, but that was all I heard." 
On a summer night at Bedford House, with windows open 
on the garden, and French horns and clarionets on the gravel 
walks, the guests had no ears for anything beyond the cant 
phrases of the card -table. There was limited loo for the 
Princess Amelia, and unlimited loo for the Duchess of Graf- 
ton ; and it was noticed that when a pipe and tabor were in- 
troduced, and the furniture was shifted for a minuet, her 
royal highness took advantage of the confusion to desert 
her own for the duchess's party. During a long and fierce 
debate on Wilkes, and a close division — so close that two 
votes were purchased with two peerages, and that invalids 
were brought down in flannels and blankets, till the floor of 
the House was compared to the pavement of Bethesda — eight 
or nine Whig ladies who could not find room in the gallery, 
after a cosy dinner, were contentedly sitting round a pool in 
one of the Speaker's chambers. " Mrs. Lumm," wTote Rigby 
from Dublin in 1765, "loses two or three hundred on a 
night ; but Mrs. Fitzroy is very angry she does not win it ;" 
and in the course of the next year George Selwyn \vas in- 
formed that the lady who had been so unlucky in Ireland 
was suspected by the gossips at Bath of having taken very 



Chap. III.] CHAllLES JAMES FOX. 79 

practical measures to balk the spite of fortune. " Your old 
friend," writes Gilly Williams, " is of the Duke of Bedford's 
partj ; and, I believe, carries pams in her pocket to the loo- 
table." But the ladies who cheated were in the long run less 
dangerous associates than the ladies who could not pay. I^o 
man of honor would expect his fair debtor to face an angry 
husband with the equanimit}^ with which he himself encoun- 
tered the surliness of his banker or the remonstrances of his 
steward ; and to the end of his gambling days (an end which 
came much earlier than popular tradition imports) it was not 
in Charles Fox to be stern with a pretty defaulter, crying as 
she had never cried except on the day when he resigned the 
seals, at the j^rospect of having on her return home to con- 
fess that she had lost lier pin-money three times over in the 
course of a single evening. 

Gambling in all its forms was then rather a profession than 
a pastime to tlie leaders of the London world. Trite and sor- 
did details of the racing-stables and the bill-discounter's back 
parlor perpetually filled their thoughts and exercised their 
pens, to the exclusion of worthier and more varied themes. 
The delicate flavors of literature palled upon those depraved 
l)alates; and even the fiercer delights of the political arena 
seemed insipid, and its prizes paltry, while sums exceeding the 
yearly income of a secretary of state or the yearly j^erquisites 
of an auditor of the Exchequer were continually depending 
upon the health of a horse or the sequence of a couple of 
cards. " The rich people win everything," writes the Earl of 
March from Newmarket. " Sir James Lowther has won 
above seven thousand." " The hazard this evening was very 
deep," says the Earl of Carlisle. "Meynell won four thou- 
sand pounds, and Pigot five thousand." " White's goes on as 
usual" (so Kigby reports to the Duke of Bedford in 1763). 
" Play there is rather moderate, ready money being established 
this winter at quinze.' Lord Masham M'as fool enough to lose 

' What moderate play for ready money meant between 1760 and 1780 
may be judged from the standing rule at Brooks's, which enjoined " every 
person playing at the new quinze table to keep fifty guineas before him." 



80 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

tliree tliousand at hazard to Lord Bolingbroke. I gness that 
was not all ready money." The greed of gain had no pity for 
the ignorance and weakness of youth, and spared neither rel- 
ative nor benefactor, nor host nor guest. "My royal visitor," 
wrote Eigby, " stayed here from Saturday till Tuesday, We 
had quinze every night and all night, but I could get none of 
liis money." A lad fresh from his public school, if he was 
known to have parents who loved him well enough to stand 
between him and dishonor, walked into a London club like a 
calf eyed by the butchers. •' The gaming," says Horace Wal- 
pole, in 1770, "is worthy the decline of our empire. The 
young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an even- 
ing. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thou- 
sand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at haz- 
ard. He swore a great oath — 'Now, if I had been playing 
deep, I might have won millions.' " 

Morality was sapped, filial affection poisoned, and tlie confi- 
dence which existed between old and trusted companions 
grievously strained by the shifts to which losers were driven 
in order to make good their enormous liabilities. No person 
of ordinary prudence could venture upon a close intimacy 
without considering whether his new comrade was one who 
would assert a comrade's claim to borrow; and the pleasant- 
est friendships, as will be seen in these pages, were sometimes 
the most perilous. The letters which passed between Selwyn 
and the partner with whom he kept a common purse, after a 
field-night at White's or Almack's, are dreary reading at the 
best ; and when both the associates had been unlucky together, 
the tone of the correspondence became nothing short of trag- 
ic' But often, in the selfishness of despair, men did far worse 



' On a Saturday morning in 1765, the Earl of March writes to Sehvyn, 
" When I came home last night I found your letter on my table. So you 
have lost a thousand j^ounds. ... As to your banker, I will call there 
to-morrow. JMake yourself easy about that, for I have three thousand 
l^ouuds now at Coutts's. There will be no bankruptcy without we are 
both ruined at the same time." Then follow some communications relat- 
ing to notes of hand and the endorsing of bank-bills, of a nature very fa- 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 81 

than sponge upon a fellow-gamester. The second Lord Lyt- 
telton, who, when the humor took him, was not averse to pos- 
ing as a censor, and who certainly was qualified for that func- 
tion by the richest experience, tells us that his contemporaries 
seemed to have made a law among themselves for declaring 
their fathers superannuated at fifty, and then disposed of the 
estates as if already their own. lie professed to know of a 
peer whose sons had traded so freely on their expectations 
that they were paying interest to the amount of eighteen 
thousand a year between them. A still blacker case was that 
of a nobleman and his brothers who, after squandering their 
patrimony, cajoled their mother into mortgaging her jointure 
(which was all that she had to maintain her), and sent her on 
some lying pretext into the parlor of a Jew money-lender in 
order to afford him an opportunity of satisfj'ing himself that 
the poor lady's life was a good one. George Selwyn had rea- 
son on his side when, on being told that a waiter at Arthur's 
had been arrested for felony, he exclaimed, " AVhat a horrid 
idea he will give of lis to the people in Newgate !" 

Some excuse for the vices of idle and irresponsible gentle- 
men was to be found in the example of those elevated ^^erson- 
ages who embodied the majesty of justice and the sanctity of 
religion. When Charles Fox first took rank among grown 
men, the head of the law in England and the head of the 
Church in Ireland were notorious as two among the hardest 
livers in their respective countries; and such a pre-eminence 
was then not lightly earned. " They tell me. Sir John," said 
George the Third to one of his favorites, " that you love a 
glass of wine." " Those who have so informed your Majesty," 

miliar to the student of eigliteentli-ceutury memoirs ; and, finally, before 
the week is out, the earl writes again, 

" My dear George, I have lost my match and am quite broke. I cannot 
tell how much. I am obliged to you for thinking of my difficulties, and 
providing for them in the midst of all your own." 

Selwyn, when he was in his senses, bitterly cried out against the pas- 
sion for cards. " It was a consumer," he said, " of four things — time, 
health, fortune, and thinking." lie eventually gave up high play, but not 
before he had tried his hand at fleecing Wilberforce. 

6 



82 THE EARLY HISTORY OF . [Chap. III. 

was the reply, " have done me great injustice ; thej should 
have said a bottle ;" and in the daj^s of Lord Chancellor North- 
in o-ton and Archbishoj) Stone very small account was taken 
of any aspirant to convivial honors who reckoned his progress 
through the evening by glasses. Philip Francis, with a mo- 
tive for keeping guard upon his tongue as strong as ever man 
had, could not always get through an after-dinner sitting 
without losing his head, although he sipped thimblefuls while 
his companions were draining bumpers.' Two of his friends, 
without any sense of having performed an exceptional feat, 
finished between them a gallon and a half of champagne "and 
burgundy — a debauch which, in this unheroic age, it almost 
makes one ill to read of. It is impossible to repress a feeling 
of undutiful satisfaction at the thought that few among our 
ancestors escaped the penalties of this monstrous self-indul- 
gence, from which so many of their innocent descendants are 
still suffering. Their lives were short, and their closing years 
far from merry. " Lord Cholmondeley," wrote Walpole, " died 
last Saturday. He was seventy, and had a constitution to have 
carried him to a hundred, if he had not destroyed it by an in- 
temperance that would have killed anybody else in half the 
time. As it was, he had outlived by fifteen years all his set, 
who have reeled into the ferry-boat so long before him." A 
squire past five-and-fifty who still rode to hounds or walked 
after partridges was the envy of the country-side for his 
health, unless he had long been its scorn for his sobriety ; and 
a cabinet minister of the same age who could anticipate with 
confidence that, at a critical juncture, he would be able to 
write a confidential despatch with his own hand must have 
observed a very different regimen from most of his contem- 
poraries. The memorable denunciation of our alliance with 
the ISTorth American savages, as splendid a burst of eloquence 
as ever thrilled the House of Lords, was levelled by an ex- 
secretary of state who never was himself except after a sharp 
attack of the gout against a secretary of state who, at thirty- 

1 Home Tooke relates that, in his younger days, it was a usual thing 
for the company at a coffee-house to end by burning their wigs. 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 83 

two, had been almost too gouty to accept the seals. Wine 
did more than work or worry to expedite that flow of promo- 
tion to which modern vice-presidents and junior lords look back 
with wistful regret. A statesman of the Georgian era was 
sailing on a sea of claret from one comfortable official haven 
to another at a period of life when a political apprentice in 
the reign of Victoria is not yet out of his indentures. 'No 
one can study the public or personal history of the eighteenth 
century without being impressed by the truly immense space 
which drinking occupied in the mental horizon of the young, 
and the consequences of drinking in that of the old. As we 
turn over volume after volume we find the same dismal story 
of gout, first dreaded as an avenger, and then, in a later and 
sadder stage, actually courted and w^elcomed as a friend. It 
is pitiful to witness the loftiest minds and the brightest wits 
reduced to the most barren and lugubrious of topics ; talking 
of old age at seven and forty ; urging a fellow-sufferer to 
stuff himself with Morello cherries, in order to develop a crisis 
in the malady ; or rejoicing with him over the cheering pros- 
pect that the gout at length showed symptoms of being about 
to do its duty. It spoke well for George the Third's common- 
sense that he never would join in the congratulations which 
his ministers eagerly and unanimously bestowed U2:)on any of 
their number who was condemned to list slippers and a Bath 
chair. " People tell me," said his Majesty, " that the gout 
is verj^ wholesome ; but I, for one, can never believe it." 

As far as he was himself concerned, the king had no occa- 
sion to adopt any such desperate medical theorj^ He applied 
to the management of his own health a force of will and an 
independence of judgment wdiich greater men than he too sel- 
dom devote to that homely but most difficult task. His im- 
agination had been profoundly impressed by the sight of his 
uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, dying at fortj'-four of a com- 
plication of diseases aggravated or caused by an excessive cor- 
pulence, wdiich the vigorous habits of a soldier who entertain- 
ed a soldier's dislike to rules of diet had altogether failed to 
keep in check. From that time forward George the Third 
observed a rigid temperance, which might not have been mer- 



84 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

itorioiis in a religious recluse, but was admirable when prac- 
tised amidst the temptations of a court by one who husband- 
ed his bodily powers for the sake of his duties. He never 
allowed himself to be complimented on his abstinence. " 'Tis 
no virtue," he said. " I only prefer eating plain and little to 
growing sickly and infirm." He would ride in all weathers 
from Kew or Windsor to St. James's Palace, and dress for a 
levee, at which he gave every individual present some token 
of his favor or displeasure.' Then he would assist at a privy 
council or do business with his ministers till six in the even- 
ing, take a cup of tea and a few slices of bread-and-butter 
without sitting down at table, and drive back into Berkshire 
by lamplight. In his recreations he was more hardy and en- 
ergetic even than in his labors. On hunting-days he remained 
in the saddle from eight in the morning till the approach of 
night sent him home to a jug of hot barle}>water, which he 
in vain endeavored to induce his attendants to share with him. 

' His Majesty made his state-receptions an opportunity for keeping his 
subjects (or, at any rate, those among them who had not forfeited his 
friendly interest by voting for Willies) up to his own mark in the matter 
of bodily exercise. Mason was rather hard upon his innocent curiosity : 

"Let all the frippery things 
' r>eplaced, bepensioned, and bestarred by kings, 
Let these prefer a levee's harmless talk ; 
Be asked how often, and how fiir, they walk." 

Warburton has left' a most characteristic notice of a morning at St. 
James's iu February, 1767. "A buffoon lord in waiting was very busy 
marshalling the circle, and he said to me, without ceremony, ']\Iove for- 
ward. You clog up the doorway.' I replied with as little, ' Did nobody 
clog up the king's doorstead more than I, there would be room for all 
honest men.' This brought the man to himself. When the king came 
up to me, he asked why I did not come to town before. I said, I under- 
stood there was no business going forward in the House in which I could 
be of service to his Majesty. He replied, he supposed the severe storm 
of snow would have brought me up. I replied, ' I was under cover of 
a very warm house.' You see, by all this, how unfit I am for courts." 

" I see nothing," writes Macaulay on the margin of his Warburton, 
"but very commonplace questions and answers; questions worthy of a 
king, and answers worthy of a bishop." 



CiiAP. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 85 

Ilis gentlemen in waiting tasted notliing of the hixmy wliich 
the humble world presumes to be the reward of courtiers, and 
not very much of the comfort on which an Englishman of 
rank reckons as his birthright. Doors and windows so habit- 
ually open that a maid of honor encountered five distinct and 
thorough draughts on the way from her own room to the 
queen's boudoir; expeditions on foot across country for ten 
miles on end, without shirking a ploughed field or skirting a 
patch of turnips ; early praj^ers in winter, with a congregation 
dwindling daily as the mornings grew colder and darker, un- 
til by Christmas the king andliis equerry were left to shiver 
through the responses together. IN^othing would have retain- 
ed men of fortune and men of pleasure in such a Spartan 
service, except the strong and disinterested affection with 
which George the Third inspired all who had to do with him 
in his character of master of a household. 

The habit and morals of that household were those which 
prevailed rather in the middle than the npper classes of his 
Majesty's subjects. The first two hundred lines of the " Win- 
ter's Evening" — a passage as much beyond Cowper's ordinary 
range as it surpasses in wealth and strength of thought, and in 
sustained beauty and finish of execution, all the pictures of 
lettered leisure and domestic peace that ever tantalized and 
tempted a politician and a Londoner — show us Vv^hat was then 
the aspect of a modest English home, refined by culture, and 
ennobled by a religious faith of which hardly a vestige can 
be traced in the records of fashionable and ministerial circles. 
Cowper has elsewhere left a reference to the astonishment 
with which the official world witnessed the appearance in its 
midst of such a phenomenon as 

" one who wears a coronet and prays " 

in the person of Lord Dartmouth. Yoltaire, writing in 1766, 
pronounced that there was no more religion in Great Britain 
than the minimum which was required for party purposes. 
Commenting on this passage in the first blank space which he 
could find, as was ever his custom when he read, Macaulay re- 
marks, "Yoltaire had lived with men of wit and fashion 



86 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

during his visit to England, and knew notliing of tlie feeling 
of the grave part of mankind, or of the middle classes. He 
says in one of his ten thousand tracts that no shopkeeper in 
London believes there is a hell." Shopkeepers who had lis- 
tened to Whitefield and the Wesleys for thirty years were 
not very likely to be sceptics on the question of future pim- 
ishment; but men of fashion did not concern themselves 
about the beliefs of smaller people. There is just as much 
and as little trace of Christianity in Horace AValpole as in 
Pliny the younger. Indeed, in this very year of 1766, Wal- 
pole describes his first sight of the man who was guiding a 
revolution in creed and practice which has deeply and per- 
manently modified the religion of tl>e English-speaking race, 
in a letter which, if translated into good Latin, might pass 
muster as an extract from the familiar correspondence of 
Gallio.^ 

Few, indeed, among the rich and great had a relish for the 
quiet round of rural pursuits and family anniversaries outside 
which their monarch never found, or looked for, happiness. 
The finest of countrj-houses was too often regarded by its 
owner as a place of exile, unless he could fill it with a com- 
pany large enough to keep the loo-table crowded until within 
an hour of daybreak, and to manufacture sufficient scandal 

^ "My health advances faster than my amusement. However, I have 
been at one opera, Mr. Wesley's. They have boys and girls with charm- 
ing voices, that sing hymns to Scotch ballad-tunes, but so long that one 
would think they were already in eternity, and knew liow much time 
they had before them. The chaiDcl is very neat, with true Gothic win- 
dows ; yet I am not converted, but I was glad to see that luxury was 
creeijing in upon them before persecution. Wesley is a lean elderly man, 
fresh-colored, his hair smoothly combed, but with a soupyon of curl at 
the ends. Wondrous clean, but as evidently an actor as Garrick. He 
spoke his sermon, but so fast, and with so little accent, that I am sure he 
has often uttered it. There were parts and eloquence in it ; but towards 
the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm. Except a 
few from curiosity, and some honoraUe icomen, the congregation was very 
mean." Those who have seen the " true Gothic " of Strawberry Hill will 
not suspect the poor Methodists of any excess in ecclesiastical decora- 
tion. 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 87 

for its own consumption, " Ten miles from town," said Wal- 
pole, " is a thousand miles from truth ;" that is to say, from 
the truth as to which of the king's brothers would lirst be 
secretly married, and what pretty lady was killing herself the 
fastest with white-lead. Lord Coventry was not alone among 
Lord Holland's friends in valuing his country-seat chiefly as a 
convenient pretext for a visit to Paris, where he took care to 
be observed at the upholsterer's " buying glasses and tapestry 
for a place in which he never sees himself but he wishes him- 
self, and all belonging to it, at the devil." Even Lord Car- 
lisle, who could paint the delights of literary retirement in 
sentences worthy of Montaigne, did not seek that retirement 
willingly. To live with a wife wdiom he worshipped in the 
most delicious palace in the three kingdoms was in his eyes a 
banishment to which it was necessary to submit as the penalty 
for past, and the preparation for future, extravagance. Castle 
Howard was endurable because there he could eat his own 
venison, burn his own firewood, and save in the course of two 
years enough to repair the disasters of a single ruinous even- 
ing. And yet he could enter heartily into all the enjoyments 
of a purer and less fevered life, and was shrewd enough to rate 
the pleasures of London at their proper worth. " I rise at six " 
(so he writes to Selwyn) ; " am on horseback till breakfast ; 
play at cricket till dinner ; and dance in the evening till I can 
scarce crawl to bed at eleven. You get up at nine ; sit till 
twelve in your night-gown ; creep dowm to White's and spend 
five hours at table ; sleep till you can escape your supper reck- 
oning ; and then make two wretches carry you in a chair, with 
three pints of claret in you, three miles for a shilling." Such 
was the daily existence of the men whom Lord Holland chose 
as mentors to his young Telemachus, 

There has been little satisfaction in dwelling upon those 
social allurements to which Charles Fox so readily succumbed ; 
but it is with very different feelings that we turn to the con- 
templation of a scene whose enticements to evil he of all men 
had the greatest merit in resisting, and whose corruptions, 
taking his career as a whole, he of all men did the most to re- 
form. The political world, then as always, was no better than 



88 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CHAr. III. 

the individuals who composed it. Private vices were reflected 
in the conduct of public affairs ; and the English peoj)le suf- 
fered, and suffers still, because at a great crisis in our history 
a large proportion among oar rulers and councillors had been 
too dissolute and prodigal to be able to afford a conscience. 
The enormous expenditure w^hicli the habits and ideas of good 
society inexorably demanded had to be met by one expedient 
or another ; and an expedient was not far to seek when the 
same men who, as a class, were the most generally addicted to 
personal extravagance, possessed a practical monopoly of po- 
litical power. Everybody who had influence in Parliament or 
at court used it for the express and avowed purpose of making 
or repairing his fortune. " There is no living in this country 
under twenty thousand a year — not that that suffices; but it 
entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." So said 
Horace Walpole, and he had a right to know; for he lived in 
the country, and on the country, during more than half a cen- 
tury, doing for the country less than half a day's w^ork in half 
a year. His father, acting like other fathers who enjoyed the 
like opportunities, charged the exchequer for the maintenance 
of his sons, according to their several claims on him, as calmly 
and systematically as a country gentleman settles an estate 
upon one child and a rent-charge on another;' and he was 
regarded, in return, by his family with precisely the same 
gratitude as he would have excited had he been generous 
with his own savings, instead of w^ith the national money. 
After describing how his eldest brother liad been appointed 
auditor of the exchequer, and his second brother clerk of the 
pells ; how, for his own share, his father had made him clerk 
of the estreats while he was still at Eton, and usher of the 
exchequer before he had left Cambridge ; and how the profits 
of the collectorship of customs had been carefully divided by 
bequest between his second brother and himself — Horace 
Walpole goes on to speak of his emoluments as a noble por- 

' When an alteration in the routine of the exchequer business reduced 
Horace's profits by ten per cent., Sir Robert, " with his wonted equity 
and tenderness," at once took measures for readjusting what he looked 
upon as the private fortunes of his sons by addiug a codicil to his will. 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 89 

tion for a third son, and calls upon his readers, sublimely ig- 
noring the consideration that they were likewise taxpayers, to 
join him in admiring the tenderness of a father who had lav- 
ished riches on him greatly beyond his deserts. "Endowed," 
he says, " so bountifully by a fond parent, it would be ridicu- 
lous to say that I have been content." He might well be con- 
tent ; for, from first to last, his gains must have amounted to 
at least a quarter of a million, in an age when a quarter of a 
million was worth a great deal more than now. 

We, who look upon politics as a barren career, by which few 
people hope to make money and none to save it, and who 
would expect a poet to found a family as soon as a prime-min- 
ister, can with difficulty form a just conception of a period 
when people entered Parliament, not because they were rich, 
but because they wanted to be rich, and when it was more 
profitable to be the member of a cabinet than the partner in 
a brewery. And j-et those who have not clearly before their 
minds the nature of that vital change which has come over 
the circumstances of English public life during the last hun- 
dred years will never understand the events of the eighteenth 
centur}', or do justice to its men — men who were spurred for- 
ward by far sharper incentives, and solicited by far fiercer 
temptations, than ours, and who, when they held a straight 
course, were entitled to very different credit from any that we 
can possibly deserve. A minister of state in the year 1S80, 
while he draws from the treasury a mere pittance compared 
with what, in two cases out of three, he would have made in 
the open market if he had applied his talents to commerce or 
to the bar, has less facilities for advancing his relatives and 
connections than if he were the chief of a law court, or a 
director of the Bank of England. A merchant who belongs 
to the nohlesse of the city can put his children in the way of 
making their fortunes for themselves. A lord chancellor, or 
a lord chief-justice, has still in his gift posts in which the num- 
ber of hours of work compares so favorably with the number 
of pounds of salary that Kigby himself would have conde- 
scended to hold one. But a prime-minister may count on the 
fingers of one hand the well-paid and lightly-worked appoint- 



90 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

ments which fall vacant during his tenure of power ; and he 
will be fortunate if he can count on the fingers of both hands 
the meritorious dej3artmental officers, and the influential par- 
liamentary supporters, who regard each of these appointments 
as their due. To select for such employment a candidate out- 
side the civil service, and under thirty years of age, would be 
to raise a mutiny in every board-room between Thames Street 
and Palace Yard. The utmost that a modern statesman can 
do for a son or a nephew is to nominate him to the privilege 
of competing with a dozen other lads in history and modern 
languages, with the prospect that, in case of success, he will 
obtain an income which would not have paid the wine-bill of 
a placeman in the days of Weymouth and Sandwich. Even 
the Duke of Newcastle would have scorned to put in his claim 
for the disposal of such paltry patronage as that to which his 
degenerate successors have limited themselves. 

But it was worth a man's while to be secretary of state un- 
der the Georges. At a time when trade was on so small a 
scale that a Lancashire manufacturer considered himself fairly 
well off on the income which his great-grandson now gives to 
his cashier, a cabinet minister, over and above the ample sal- 
ary of his office, might reckon confidently npon securing for 
himself, and for all who belonged to him and who came after 
him, a permanent maintenance, not dependent upon the vicissi- 
tudes of party, which would be regarded as handsome, and. 
even splendid, in these days of visible and all-pervading opu- 
lence. One nobleman had eight thousand a year in sinecures, 
and the colonelcies of three regiments. Another, as auditor 
of the exchequer, inside which he never looked, had eight 
thousand pounds in years of peace, and twenty thousand in 
years of war. A third, with nothing to recommend him ex- 
cept his outward graces, bowed and whisjjered himself into 
four great employments, from which thirteen or fourteen hun- 
dred British guineas flowed month by month into the lap of 
his Parisian mistress. And the lucrative places which a states- 
man held in his own name formed but a part, and often the 
least part, of the advantages that he derived from his position. 
All the claims on his purse were settled, and all services reu- 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 91 

dcred to liiiii, lioncrable and dishonorable alike, were recom- 
pensed by fresh, and ever fresh, inroads upon the exchequer. 
The patron of his borough, if he was a commoner ; his mouth- 
piece in the Lower House, if he was a peer ; the gentleman 
of the bedchamber, who stood his friend at court ; the broker 
who, when the last loan was brought out, had got to know 
more than was pleasant about the allotment of the scrip ; his 
racing friend, who had nothing left to lose ; his French cook, 
his children's tutor, his led captain, his hired poet, and his in- 
spired pamphleteer, were all paid with nominations, or pacitied 
with reversions.' If a comfortable berth was already occupied, 



' When Lord Holland went to Italy in 1763, he thought it necessary to 
provide for his son's tutor ; so he bequeathed him as a legacy to Lord 
Bute, who transferred him to George Grenville. Through this recom- 
mendation he afterwards obtained a pension out of the privy purse of 
three hundred a year. Cowper did not exaggerate when he wrote — 

" The levee swarms, as if in golden pomp 
Were charactered on every statesman's door, 
' Battered and bankrupt fortunes mended here.' " 

The Duke of Grafton procured five hundred a year for an old Newmarket 
acquaintance who had squandered his fortune on the turf. A single 
happy Scotchman, in his character of minister's friend, enjoyed a cap- 
tain's commission for his son of ten years old, an income of three thou- 
sand in hand, and the reversion of a place valued at seventeen hundred 
pounds a year: "I do not," said Wilkes, " mean Scottish, but English 
pounds." Bute's hackwriter in prose had a pension from the public of 
six hundred a year. His poet, one Dalrymple, who libelled Pitt in a per- 
formance entitled " Rodondo, or the State Jugglers," which is almost a 
literary curiosity on account of the badness of the rhymes, was gratified 
with the attorney-generalship of Grenada. The Earl of Sandwich, not 
liking to trench upon his lay patronage, found it more convenient to 
have his lamjjoons written by gentlemen in holy orders, whom he could 
reward with crown livings. Paul Whitehead, by using such powers of 
satire as he possessed against the enemies of men who had something to 
give, ended by getting eight hundred a year as deputy-treasurer to the 
chamber; whereas the trade value of his collected works might have 
been something under eight hundred shillings. Dr. Johnson, speaking 
of his own " London," the copyright of which noble poem he sold for 
ten guineas, said that he might, perhaps, have been content with less; 



92 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

at any rate the succession to it miglit still be worth the having. 
A pajnnaster of the works, or an auditor of the plantations, 
with plenty of money to buy good liquor, and plenty of time 
to drink it, did not live forever ; and a next appointment to 
the civil service in the last century might be discounted as 
freely as a next presentation to a living in our own. 

When every desirable office was filled two deep, there still 
remained the resource of a pension — a resource elastic and 
almost unlimited under a monarch who was never afraid of 
appearing before his Parliament in the character of an insol- 
vent debtor. Those recipients of Avhat — with an irony which 
the taxpayer was beginning to understand — was styled the 
royal bounty, who were too disreputable to figure on the Eng- 
lish civil list, were quietly and snugly quartered on the Irish 
establishment. Decent men were not always willing to see 
themselves enrolled in a column of names which, approj^riate- 
ly headed by the Queen of Denmark, recalled the successive 
scandals of three reigns ; but squeamishness was not the fail- 
ing of the age, and the Irish pensions were trebled in the 
first thirty years of George the Third. The English pension 
list grew steadily and silently, with occasional periods of sud- 
den and very perceptible expansion. It was reckoned that 
every change of government (and changes of government 
were far more frequent then than now) cost the countrj'- 
from nine to fifteen thousand a year. A minister who was 
true to his order never allowed himself to be shelved, or 
shifted, or degraded, or even promoted, without getting 
something for himself, his wife, or his son-in-law. Whenever 
the political cards were shufiled the people paid the stakes ; 
and a dozen pensions had generally been distributed, and 
half a dozen increased, before the seals, the key, and the sticks 
had got into the hands where they were to remain for the 
next twelvemonth. When Lord Northington ceased to be 
chancellor in order to become president of the council, he 
would not leave the woolsack till he had secured an immedi- 



" but Paul Whitehead had a little before got ten guineas for a poem, and 
I would not take less than Paul "Whitehead." 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 93 

ate pension of two thousand a year, a prospective pension of 
four thousand a 3'ear, and the reversion for two lives of the 
clerkship of the hanaper ; and this, although he had already 
provided for his daughters by vesting a rich sinecure with a 
trustee for their benefit. There were times when a disagree- 
able man who knew his own powers of annoyance, or even a 
weak man wdio had fathomed his own worthlcssness, could 
make almost any terms he chose with those wdio desired to 
get rid of him ; and there was nothing whatever wliich a 
strong man, by watching his occasion, might not obtain as the 
price of his services. Murray, iu 1756, was offered a pension 
of six thousand a year, together with the first vacant teller- 
ship, which was worth at least as much again, for his nephew, 
if he would remain in the House of Commons with the at- 
torney -general's income of seven thousand, in addition to his 
own enormous gains as leader of the bar. But, almost alone 
among statesmen, he refused to make his market out of the 
perplexities of his colleagues. " Good God," he said, " what 
merit have I that you should load this country, for wdiich so 
little is done with spirit, with a fresh burden of six thousand 
a year ?" 

As were the leaders, so were the followers. " If any noble 
lord challenged me to assert that there is much corruption in 
both Houses, I would laugh in his face, and tell him that he 
knows it as well as I." So said Lord Chatham plainly and 
openly in his place among the peers ; and there were few no- 
ble lords, and not many honorable gentlemen, whose personal 
experience was such that they would have had the right or 
the face to contradict him. Parliament, chosen by corrupt 
constituencies, was corruptly influenced by corrupt ministers, 
of whom Junius told the literal truth when he said that they 
addressed themselves neither to the passions nor to the un- 
derstanding, but simply to the touch. The arguments by 
which Grenville and Grafton persuaded their sui3porters 
were bank bills for two hundred pounds and upwards, so 
generously dealt about at a premier's levee that sometimes 
they were slipped into a hand w^hich was ashamed to close 
upon them ; tickets for state lotteries, sold to members of 



94 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

Parliament in parcels of five hundred, and resold by them at 
a profit of two pounds a ticket ; government loans subscribed 
for by the friends of government at par, and then thrown on 
the cit}^ at a premium of seven, and even eleven, per cent. 
Lord Bute and his adherents by one such transaction robbed 
the country of nearly four hundred thousand pounds, an am- 
ple share of which (as was roundly asserted and may with no 
breach of charity be believed) found its way into Henry Fox's 
capacious pocket.' Then there were favorable contracts for 
honorable members connected ■with commerce, or who were 
willing to be connected with commerce when they had a 
chance of supplying the fieet with sailcloth and salt pork at 
exorbitant rates, and of a quality which was left pretty much 
to their own sense of patriotic obligation. And a gentleman 
who liked to get his price without sacrificing his ease might 
have his choice of pensions, secret and acknowledged ; and of 
highly endowed posts, in every climate of the globe, whose 
functions could be performed while seated at the whist-table 
of Brooks's by any one who had proved his fitness for public 
employment by buying a borough, bribing a corporation, or 
swamping a county with fictitious votes. George Selwyn, 
who returned two members and had something to say in the 
election of a third, was at one and the same time surveyor- 
general of crown lands — which he never surveyed — registrar 
in chancery at Barbadoes — which he never visited — and sur- 
veyor of the meltings and clerk of the irons in the mint — 



' Tlierc survives a remarkable narrative of a dinner given by the Duke 
of Grafton to the favored few who were behind the seenes when a new 
loan was brought upon the stage. Nothing could exceed the cleverness 
and presence of mind with which Charles Townshend, then chancellor of 
the exchequer, purposely over-acted his part of a headlong and puzzle- 
headed man of business in order to confuse the accounts and retain for 
himself the lion's share of the booty. When such were the guardians of 
the public purse, there was point in the epigram suggested by an an- 
nouncement that the precincts of the Treasury were to be patrolled after 
dark. 

" From the night to the morning 'tis true all is right; 
But who will secure it from morning to night?" 



CiiAi'. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 95 

where he showed himself once a week in order to eat a din- 
ner which lie ordered, but for whicli the nation paid.' 

When offices, whose unfulfilled duties were supposed to lie 
in England, had been heaped upon one individual in such 
profusion as to excite, not indeed the moral disapprobation, 
but the hungry jealousy, of his brethren, a judicious pluralist, 
who could scent a job across the seas, was still only at the be- 
ginning of his acquisitions. Ireland, the natural prey of the 
place-hunter, had to contribute towards the bribing of our 
own senate before she proceeded to satiate the rapacity of her 
own. Her richest salaries were transmitted to London, and 
her most elevated functions were discharged by deputies at 
Dublin, while her native politicians were fain to content them- 
selves with the leavings which Westminster and Whitehall 
disdained. An English duke was Lord Treasurer of Ireland ; 
the mouth of an English orator had been effectually stopped 
with the chancellorship of her exchequer;^ Righy was her 
vice-treasurer, with three thousand five hundred a year, and 
had actually contrived to become her master of the rolls as 
well, at a time when a member of the Irish Parliament thought 
himself lucky if he could make up his bundle of plunder out 
of such incongruous materials as commissionerships of the 
Linen Board, cornetcies in the dragoons, fragments of Church 
preferment, odds and ends of pensions, and employments in 
the revenue too humble for their fame to have crossed the 
Channel. And, when Britain had been drained dry, and there 

' The liberties of England were in as much clanger in 1770 through 
the pocket as they had been in 1G40 from the sword. "Every man of 
consequence almost in the kingdom," wrote Bishop Watson, " has a son, 
relation, friend, or dependent whom he wishes to provide for; and, un- 
fortunately for the liberty of this country, the crown has the means of 
gratifying the expectation of them all." 

^ Hamilton, whose single speech has given him a sobriquet by whicli 
he is much better known than by his Christian names of William Gerard, 
was provided for out of the Irish Treasury for life ; and a long life it 
was. Forty years after his famous performance he still moved in society, 
hauglitily measuring out precious morsels of sarcasm with the economy 
which became a man who had earned a quarter's salary by every sen- 
tence that he had uttered in public. 



96 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. HI. 

was nothing more to be squeezed from Ireland, ministers, in 
an evil hour for themselves, remembered that there were two 
millions of Englishmen in America who had struggled through 
the difficulties and hardships which beset the pioneers of civ- 
ilization, and who, now that their daily bread was assured to 
them, could afford the luxury of maintaining an army of sine- 
curists. The suggestion cannot be said to have originated 
on the other shore of the Atlantic. " It was not," said Junius, 
" Virginia that wanted a governor, but a court favorite that 
wanted a salary." Yirginia, however, and her sister colonies, 
were not supposed to know what was best for their own in- 
terests, or, at any rate, for the interests of their masters ; and 
plenty of gentlemen were soon drinking their claret and pay- 
ing their debts out of the savings of the fishermen of JSTew 
Hampshire and the farmers of New Jersey, and talking, with 
that perversion of sentiment which is the inevitable outgrowth 
of privilege, about the "cruelty" of a secretary of state who 
hinted that they would do well to show themselves occasion- 
ally among the people whose substance they devoured. And 
yet in most cases it was fortunate for America that her place- 
men had not enough public spirit to make them ashamed of 
being absentees. Such was the private character of many 
among her official staff that their room was cheaply purchased 
by the money which they spent outside the country. The 
best things in the colonies generally fell to bankrupt mem- 
bers of Parliament, who were as poor in political principle as 
in worldly goods ; and the smaller posts were regarded as 
their special inheritance by the riffraff of the election com- 
mittee-room and the bad bargains of the servants' hall. " In 
one word," we are told, and told truly, " America has been 
for many years the hospital of England." 

The aspect of their mercenary Parliament affected all 
thoughtful citizens with a feeling akin to despair. There was 
no hope of amendment except through repentance ; and re- 
pentance implied at least a rudimentary sense of shame. But 
a ministerial hireling cared nothing whatever for the disap- 
proval of any one outside the House of Commons who did 
not happen to be a freeman in his own borough ; and among 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 97 

those with whom lie lived, and wliose esteem he Vcalned, pub- 
lic employment was looked upon as a sort of personalty of 
which everybody had a clear right to scrape together as mucb 
as he could, without inquiring whether the particular post he 
coveted ought to exist at all, or whether he himself was the 
proper man to hold it. " If," wrote Sir William Draper, "Lord 
Granby is generous at the public expense, as Junius invidi- 
ously calls it, the public is at no more expense for his lord- 
ship's friends than it would be if any other set of men pos- 
sessed those offices ;" and so self-evident did this proposition 
appear to Lord Granby's friends that they did not thank their 
champion for going out of his way to defend a system which, 
in the eyes of those who lived by it, needed defence as little 
as did the institution of private property. 

" If I had a son," said a member of the House of Commons, 
to the House of Commons, at a moment when he was angry 
enough to be candid at the expense of his own past history, 
and that of half his hearers, " I would say to him ' Get into 
Parliament. Make tiresome speeches. Do not accept the 
first offer; but' wait till you can make great provision for 
yourself and your family ; and then call yourself an indepen- 
dent country gentleman.'" The picture was not overdrawn. 
The first lesson taught to a political apprentice, both by ex- 
ample and by precept, was to mock at principle, and fight for 
his own hand. Lord Shelburne relates how, at the coronation 
of George the Third, he found himself next to Lord Mel- 
combe, against whom he had an electioneering grievance, and 
whom he at once proceeded to take to task. His charges 
were met by an impudent equivocation, which, with the inno- 
cence of one-and-twenty, he would not allow to pass unno- 
ticed. "Well!" laughed his elder, "did you ever know any- 
body get out of a great scrape but by a great lie?" In the 
course of the next year, the young man, for want of a more 
promising confidant, invited Henry Fox to sympathize with 
the theory that "gentlemen of independent fortune should be 
trustees between the king and the people, and make it their 
vocation to be of service to both, without becoming the slaves 
of either;" but the only response to his aspirations which 

7 



98 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

Lord Shelburne could get out of the paymaster was the recom- 
mendation to come up to London, and ask for a place. " This 
will lead directly to what I suppose you aim at. You'll never 
get it from that trusteeship that you speak of ; nor, to say 
truth, should you get it till you have got rid of such puerile 
notions," 

It is impossible to deny that, in these cynical phrases, Henry 
Fox expressed the creed of five out of six of his contempora- 
ries. The prizes within the Parliamentary arena were too 
tempting — the pressure from without, under a system of rep- 
resentation nothing better than illusory, was too fitful and 
feeble — for statesmen to find their interest in turning from 
the chase after incomes and ribbons to the pursuit of un- 
dertakings which might promote the welfare of the people. 
"Parties," said Lord Mansfield, in 1767, "aim only at places, 
and seem regardless of measures." " The cure," wrote George 
Grenville, "must come from a serious conviction and right 
measures, instead of annual struggles for places and pensions ;" 
and the times must, indeed, have been bad when George Gren- 
ville took to preaching. Unfaithful to the nation when in 
office, politicians no longer pretended to be true to each other 
in opposition. Amidst the turmoil of selfish ambitions and 
rival cupidities which was seething around him, a man did 
not venture to rely on others, and soon ceased to merit that 
others should rely on him. Outside the ranks of the little 
band which surrounded Lord Eockingham, there were not a 
dozen members who could be counted upon to work in con- 
cert during a single session ; and the notion of a patriotic and 
disinterested statesman being able to keep his followers to- 
gether throughout the weary years that must pass between 
the hour when a great question is first mooted and the hour 
when its advocacy is finally crowned with success would have 
supplied Lord North's jovial colleagues with material for hi- 
larity during the longest carouse that ever was remembered 
by the butler at the Pay-ofiice or the Admiralty. 

"While the ties which united men, who professed to be act- 
ing for the public, were too often but a rope of sand, fidelity 
was anything but eternal between those who were bound to- 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 99 

gether by the golden fetters of oifice. Where mutual respect 
did not exist, there could be little mutual loyalty; and a 
statesman who one year had been making out pensions to the 
courtiers who had obliged his colleague, and warrants against 
the printers who had libelled him, next year would be thun- 
dering against him in Parliament, and plotting against him 
in a hundred constituencies, while the temples of friendship 
which they had dedicated to each other at their respective 
country-seats were still standing unroofed as a monument to 
political inconstancy. It is the nature, said Bacon, of extreme 
self-lovers to set a house on fire if it were but to roast their 
eggs; and men whose device was "Every one for himself, 
and the Exchequer for us all," did not hesitate to undermine 
a government in order to bring about an absurdly small ac- 
cession of dignity or emolument for themselves. During the 
earlier years of George the Third, administrations fell so fre- 
quently that an anonymous statistician, the very peculiar flavor 
of whose humor betrays Burke in disguise, calculated that five 
prime-ministers maintained themselves for an average of just 
fourteen months apiece from the day when they kissed in 
to the day when they were kicked out. Meanwhile, the mi- 
nor constellations of tlie ofticial galaxy were darting about 
like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. Five hundred and 
thirty placemen went in and out, or up and down, between 
the Great Commoner's resignation in 1761, and Lord Chatham's 
resumption of power in 176G. As one glittering transmuta- 
tion succeeded another, with profit to the scene-shifters, but 
utterly barren of entertainment to the spectators, the pit and 
the galleries sometimes hissed, but for the most part looked 
on with contemptuous and silent indifference. The great mass 
of Englishmen had learned by repeated experience that a 
change of ministry brought them no economy in their expen- 
diture, no removal of ancient abuses, no beneficent additions 
to their statute-book — nothing but ever-growing files of quar- 
terly receipts signed with the least honored names in the three 
kingdoms. A profound distrust of public men ; a discontent 
which afforded the matter, and suggested the title, of the 
most instructive, if not the most eloquent, political treatise in 



100 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. III. 

our language ; and that sullen disbelief in a peaceful remedy 
whicli is the gravest of national maladies, were eating their 
way fast and deep into the hearts of the people.' 

" Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men's 
opinions to think themselves happy." '^ So said a famous stu- 
dent who, to his cost, was likewise a minister of state; and 
tlie truth of the saying will hardly be questioned by a mod- 
ern servant of the crown who knows what it is to sacrifice 
liealth and sleep, books, art, field-sports, and travel ; who dur- 
ing four days in the week enjoys no social relaxation beyond 
the whispered hope of a count-out exchanged with an over- 
worked colleague, and who looks for no material recompense 
over and above a precarious income, half of which is spent 
upon perfunctory festivities that consume the few poor even- 
ings which the House of Commons spares, and the other half 
barely replaces the capital that has been lavished on the elec- 
tions of a lifetime. But those received commonplaces about 
the sweets of office, which are little better than dreary irony 
when applied to the councillors of Queen Yictoria, meant a 
great deal in the ears of a statesman who had the privilege 
of serving her grandfather. With no annual bill of a hun- 
dred clauses to turn into an act on pain of being pilloried as 
an idler by half the newspapers in the country ; with a dozen 
bribed burgesses for constituents, and a couple of hundred 

* Burke, in the first page of the " Thoughts on the Cause of the Present 
Discontents," sums up the nature of the present uneasiness in one sweep- 
ing and majestic sentence. "Tliat government is at once dreaded and 
contemned ; tliat tlie laws are despoiled of all their respected and salu- 
tary terrors ; that their inaction is a subject of ridicule, and their exer- 
tion of abhorrence ; that rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn 
plausibilities of the world, have lost their reverence and effect ; that our 
own foreign politics are as much deranged as our domestic economy ;' that' 
our depeiidencies are slackened in their afiection, and loosed from their 
obedience ; that we know neither how to yield or how to enforce ; that 
hardly anything above or below, abroad or at home, is sound or entire ; 
but that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in families, 
in Parliament, in the nation, prevail beyond the disorders of any former 
time : these are facts universally admitted and lamented." 

* Lord Bacon's eleventh essay, " Of Great Place." 



Chap. III.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 101 

bribed supporters to clieer him as soon as lie rose from the 
Treasury bench ; his lot inchided tlie comforts as ■well as the 
gains of public life, while the toil and the ferment, the schem- 
ing, the declaiming, the writing of pamphlets, the framing of 
resolutions, the arranging of deputations, county meetings, and 
petitions, were for the opponents who labored to dislodge him. 
The veriest stranger who for the first time threw his eyes 
round the House of Commons could distinguish at a glance 
the 

" Patriots, bursting witli lieroic rage," 
from the 

" Placemen, all tranquillity and smiles." 

With everything to get, and nothing to trouble him, a min- 
ister of the eighteenth century regarded office as a paradise 
from which no man of sense would be so infatuated as to 
banish himself on any quixotic grounds of public duty. That 
was the doctrine of the school in which was reared the only 
English statesman who has left a reputation of the first or- 
der, acquired not in power, but while self-condemned to an 
almost lifelong opposition ; who manfully and cheerfully sur- 
rendered all that he had been taught to value for the sake of 
principles at which he had been diligently trained to sneer. 
So that to one who began his course weighted and hampered 
by the worst traditions of the past we owe much of what is 
highest and purest in our recent political history ; and the son 
and pupil of Henry Fox became in his turn the teacher of 
Romilly and Mackintosh, of Earl Grey, Lord Althorpe, and 
Earl Russell. 



102 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 



CHAPTER IV. 

George the Third. — His Education. — His Assiduity in Public Business. — 
His Theory of Personal Government. — The King's Friends. — The 
King's Interference in the Details of Parliament and of Elections. — His 
Dislike of the Whigs. — Formation of the Whig Party. — Lord Rocking- 
ham's Administration. — His Dismissal. — Lord Chatham's Government 
and the Successive Changes in its Composition. — General Election of 
1768. — Fox cliosen for Midhurst. — His Political Opinions and Preju- 
dices. — He selects his Party and takes his Seat. — Lord Shelburne. — 
Fox as a Young Politician. 

The venality and servility of Parliament presented an irre- 
sistible temptation to a monarch who aimed at extending the 
influence of the crown. George the Second, whose solid and 
"unambitions intellect had tanght him that the true secret of 
kingcraft was to get the best ministers he could find, and then 
leave them responsible for their own business, had seen Eng- 
land safe through immense perils, and had died at the very 
height of prosperity and renown.' "In times full of doubt 
and danger to his person and his family," he maintained, as 
Burke most truly said, the dignity of the throne and the lib- 
erty of the people not only unimpaired, but improved, for the 
space of three-and-thirty years. A different policy from his, 
pursued during the next two-and-twenty years, mutilated the 
empire, loaded the nation with debt, reduced the military rep- 

1 " What an enviable death ! In the greatest period of the glory of 
this country and of his reign, in perfect tranquillity at home, at seventy- 
seven, growing blind and deaf, to die without a pang before any reverse 
of fortune ; nay, but two days before a ship-load of bad news !" (Walpole 
to Maun, October 28, 1760.) " Upon the whole " (wrote Lord Walde- 
grave in his old employer's lifetime), " he has some qualities of a great 
prince, many of a good one, none which are essentially bad ; and I am 
thoroughly convinced that hereafter he will be numbered among those 
patriot kings under whose government the people have enjoyed the 
greatest haj^piness." 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 103 

iitation of Britain lower than it ever stood before or since, 
made formidable inroads upon freedom, and rendered the 
crown itself so irksome a burden that its wearer thought very 
seriously of resigning it. Then at last, when the disorders en- 
gendered b}^ the system of personal government as understood 
by George the Third were at their height, the author of that 
system, most happily for his own fame, yielded himself to the 
domination of a stronger will even than his own. Our poli- 
tics once more flowed along the constitutional channel from 
which thenceforward tlicy rarely diverged. Events nearer to 
our time, and far more startling in their magnitude and more 
agreeable to our patriotic feelings, threw into the shade the 
Middlesex election and the ximerican revolution ; and one 
who during the best years of his life had been known as the 
most wilful and the least prosperous of rulers came to be re- 
membered as a good easy man, under whose auspices, as a re- 
ward for his virtue, Trafalgar Avas added to the roll of our 
victories. The popular impression of George the Third is de- 
rived from the period when he had Pitt for a master and Nel- 
son for a servant, and has little in common with the impres- 
sion wliich has stamped itself upon the minds of those who 
have studied him when he was as much the rival as the sov- 
ereign of Fox.^ 

It is hard to sa}^ whether the monarch or the subject suffered 
most from the folly of a parent. Frederic, Prince of Wales, 
died when his son was twelve years old, and left him an ex- 
ample which he did not desire to emulate.^ There was no 
family likeness between the trifler who could see nothing in 
the fruitless heroism of Fontenoy except an occasion for 
stringing together a score of foolish couplets about Mars and 

' "Here is a man," said Dr. Johnson, in 1784, "who has divided the 
kingdom with Cgesar ; so that it was a doubt whether the nation should 
be ruled by the sceptre of George the Third or the tongue of Fox." 

^ " He had great virtues," said a foolish clergyman in his funeral ser- 
mon on the Prince of Wales. "Indeed, they degenerated into vices. He 
was very generous, but I hear that his generosity has ruined a great many 
people ; and then his condesceusiou was such that he kept very bad 
company." 



104 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

Bacchus, and the grave and hiborious administrator who al- 
ways regarded the nation's misfortunes as his own. Half a 
dozen love-songs which lost something of their silliness in a 
French dress, the memory of a few practical jokes perpetrat- 
ed at the expense of his own dependents, and some bad tra- 
ditions of filial jealousy and undutifulness were all the teach- 
ino' which Georo:e the Third inherited from his father. But 
the training to which he was subjected by his mother had a 
marked and durable effect upon his character and his actions. 
A narrow-minded intriguing woman, with the Continental 
notion of the relations between royalty and the rest of man- 
kind, the princess did her utmost to imbue the essentially 
English nature of her son with the ideas that pervaded a 
petty German court before Europe had been traversed 
throughout its length and breadth by the legions of Napo- 
leon and the doctrines of Mirabeau. Ambitious to see him 
governing as arbitrarily as an elector of Saxony, and forget- 
ting that to secure the conquests of Clive and Wolfe abroad 
and to moderate between Pitt and Murray at home required 
very different qualifications from those which sufiiced a po- 
tentate whose best energies were spent on settling how large 
a service of Dresden china was to be given as connnission to 
a cardinal who had purchased him a Correggio, she willingly 
allowed his strong mind to remain uncultivated by study and 
overgrown with prejudices. As far as any knowledge of the 
duties and the position which Avere before him were con- 
cerned, she kept him in tlie nursery till within two years of 
the time that he mounted the throne. All that bedchamber 
women and pages of the backstairs could tell him about 
royal prerogative and popular rights she took care that he 
should learn ; but at that point his political education ended. 
There was some talk among his many tutors of having a 
treatise on international commerce written for his instruc- 
tion ; but the work stopped with the choice of a citle, and 
the sovereign of a nation which led, and at one conjuncture 
in his reign almost monopolized, the traffic of the globe went 
through life ignorant of everything connected with maritime 
trade to a degree which would have been hardly becoming 



CiiAi'. IV.J CHARLES JAMES FOX. 105 

in a King of Bohemia. The Bishop of Norwich prepared him 
for the task of ruling a eommunitj the individual member^ 
of whidi, to an extent unlvuown elsewhere, had long been in 
the habit of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, 
by teaching him to view with suspicion and dislike all except 
one of the many forms of faith which prevailed in his do- 
minions. Another of his preceptors enjoyed the reputation 
of being a Jacobite ; and the belief that this gentleman had 
contrived to instil his principles into the mind of his pnpil 
in pai^ -accounted for the enthusiasm with which, after the 
death of George the Second, the old malcontents of '15 and 
'45 hastened to transfer their allegiance from the white rose 
to the white horse. It is easy to imagine the scandal that 
M'as created among the AVhig families by the intelligence that 
one of the very few books which their future king was ever 
authentically known to have read was a Jesuit history of 
their own great and glorious Revolution. 

If to be a Jacobite was to regard himself as " the great ser- 
vant of the commonwealth,"- in the sense in which that phrase 
was employed by James the First, George the Third was in- 
deed a worthy successor of the Stuarts. He jDOSsessed all the 
accomplishments which are required for doing business as 
business is done by kings. He talked foreign languages like 
a modern prince of the blood, and he wrote like the master 
of every one with whom he corresponded. The meaning of 
the brief and blunt confidential notes in which he made 
known his wishes to an absent minister never failed to stand 
clearly out through all his indifferent spelling and careless 
grammar. Those notes are dated at almost every minute 
from eight in the morning to eleven at night ; for, as long as 
work remained on hand, all hours w^ere Avorking-hours with 
the king. Punctual, patient, self-willed, and self-possessed ; 
intruding into every department; inquiring greedily into 
every detail ; making everbody's duty his own, and then do- 
ing it conscientiously, indefatigably, and as badly as it could 
possibly be done — he had almost all the qualities which en- 
able a man to use or misuse an exalted station, with hardly 
any of the talents by means of which such a station can be 



106 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

reached from below. If lie had been born a private gentle- 
man, his intellectual powers would never have made him a 
junior lord of the Treasury ; but his moral characteristics 
were such that, being a king, he had as much influence on the 
conduct of affairs as all his cabinet together. A Frederic 
the Great without the cleverness, he loved his own way no 
less than his German brother, and got it almost as frequently ; 
with this difference in the result, that in the score of years 
during which he governed according to his favorite theory 
he weakened England as much as Frederic ever aggrandized 
Prussia. 

That theory is stated, as concisely as George the Third 
stated everything, in the letter which recalled Pitt to his 
councils in 1Y66. " I know," wrote the king, " the Earl of 
Chatham will zealously give his aid towards destroying all 
party distinctions, and restoring that subordination to govern- 
ment which can alone preserve that inestimable blessing, lib- 
erty, from degenerating into licentiousness." It certainly re- 
quired self-assurance nothing less than royal to invite a states- 
man to re-enter the cabinet for the express purpose of bolster- 
ing up a policy the first-fruits of which, five years before, had 
been his own expulsion from ofiice. To rise above faction, 
to regard nothing but individual worth, to " distribute the 
functions of state by rotation," to " withstand that evil called 
connection," to " root out the present method of parties band- 
ing together" — such were the fine words under which the 
king disguised his unalterable intention to be the real as well 
as the titular ruler of the nation. He had taken to heart the 
fable of the bundle of sticks, the very last advice which his 
own grandfather would have given him on his death-bed ; and 
he was firmly resolved that no combination of his subjects 
should ever be powerful enough, or permanent enough, to 
make head against his single will. Blind to the truth of 
Burke's noble saying that private honor is the foundation of 
public trust, and friendship no mean step towards patriotism, 
he never scrupled to exert his authority and to expend his 
own powers of persuasion and the nation's money in order 
to foster disunion among politicians who had been accustom- 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 107 

ed to act together in Parliament and in office, to break np al- 
liances, to sow suspicions, to efface the recollection of past 
dangers surnionnted in common and old services mutually 
rendered and received. He M'ished public men to transfer 
their fidelity as lightly as he himself transferred that which 
the London Gazette styled his " confidence." Knocking chan- 
cellors of the Exchequer and first lords of the Treasury down 
like ninepins, changing his advisers "as a parson changes his 
church-wardens," he reduced the administration of the country 
to such confusion and disrepute that in his more thoughtful 
hours he stood aghast at the success of his own performance. 
" How many secretaries of state have you corresponded with ?" 
he asked an ex-Governor of Gibraltar. " Five, sire," was the 
reply. " You see my situation," said the king. " This trade 
of politics is a rascally business. It is a trade for a scoundrel, 
and not for a gentleman." 

He had only himself to thank. Since his day, as well as 
before it, English monarchs have occasionally so far failed in 
their constitutional obligations as to show themselves parti- 
sans ; but all the preference which, from time to time, the 
crown has displayed towards one or another of the existing 
parties never produced a tithe of the mischief which was 
brought about by this king, who set his heart upon creat- 
ing a party of his own. When he first took that calamitous 
project in hand, he found everybody whose services as an 
effective and respectable supporter were worth securing al- 
ready enlisted under the banner of some recognized parlia- 
mentary captain. Of what sort of materials, asked Burke, 
must that man have been made who could sit whole years in 
the House of Commons, with five hundred and fifty of his 
fellow-citizens, " without seeing any sort of men whose char- 
acter, conduct, or disposition would lead him to associate 
himself with them, to aid and be aided, in any one system of 
public utility?" The only recruiting -ground that was left 
open to his Majesty's operations lay among the waifs and 
strays of politics ; among the disappointed, the discontented, 
and the discredited ; among tliose whom Chatham would not 
stooiD to notice, and Newcastle had not cared to buy ; and out 



108 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

of siicli material as this was gradually organized a band of 
camp-followers promoted into the ranks, at the head of which 
no decent leader would have been seen marching through the 
lobby. These mercenaries, who dubbed themselves the king's 
friends (" as if," said Junius, " the body of the people were 
the king's enemies"), were the very last whom George the 
Third himself would have complimented with such a title. 
They were attached to him whose friendship they boasted not 
by the bonds of affection and familiarity, but by a secret un- 
derstanding in accordance with which they placed their con- 
science and their honor at his absolute disposal ; while he, on 
his part, undertook that they should get, and under all cir- 
cumstances should keep, the best of everytliing that was go- 
ing. He loved to surmount himself in his privacy with kind- 
ly honest folk, not too clever to relisli his garrulity, and give 
him plenty of their own in return, nor so n:iucli men of the 
world as to put him out of conceit with his simple habits and 
homely pleasures.* But while he chose the associates of his 
intimacy among the best, if not the wisest, of the class from 
which the companions of royalty are drawn, he was altogether 
indifferent to the personal character of those whom he hired 
as his tools. Among the king's friends in the Peers, the stew- 
ard of the household was an avowed profligate. The Earl of 
March, whom to call an avowed profligate would be to absolve 
with faint blame, remained a lord of the bedchamber for 
eight-and-twenty years, under eleven successive prime-minis- 
ters. Another lord of the bedchamber, who received a spe- 
cial mark of the royal gratitude in the shape of a regiment, 
which had been taken from the most respected soldier in the 

' Lord Carlisle decliued the bedchamber on the avowed, and most avow- 
able, ground that it would not admit him to personal relations with his 
sovereign. " I have no reason," he wrote, " to expect, however long I 
may continue, that either by assiduity, attention, and respect I can ever 
succeed to any kind of confidence with my master. That familiarity 
whicli subsists between other princes and those of their scrvauts whose 
attachment they are convinced of "being excluded from our court by the 
king's living so much in private damps all views of ambition which 
might arise from that quarter." 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 109 

army as a punishment for giving an independent vote in the 
House of Commons, had run away from his beautiful wife 
with at least one girl of family. A third king's friend, after 
making the crown his accomplice in an impudent but unsuc- 
cessful attempt to swindle his creditors, was judged too bad to 
remain even in the bedchamber, and was accordingly packed 
off to Virginia as its governor. And as for the nobleman who 
had charge of the great wardrobe, it is enough to say that he 
and the Earl of Sandwich were the only members of the Med- 
menhani Club whom Wilkes thought worthy of being admit- 
ted to a private reading of the " Essay on AVoman." 

These were very different people from the excellent, if 
somewhat commonplace, colonels and chaplains wlio, as they 
gossipped round her tea-table, were sketched to the life by 
Miss Burney in those " Memoirs " M'hich, in their delightful 
prolixity (unavoidable when describing such a court as 
George the Third's), are a full compensation for the loss of 
another Cecilia, or even another Evelina. The king knew 
very w^ell whom he could venture to live with after his own 
fashion, and had no notion of giving Lord Bottetort or Jerry 
Dyson the opportunity of manufacturing a good story out of 
the pretty playful ceremonies with which the royal household 
observed a princess's birthday, or of amusing a supper-table 
at White's with a reproduction of the wry faces they had 
made over his Majesty's barley-water. What he wanted from 
his so-called friends was not their company or their conversa- 
tion, but their votes. He kept up just so much communica- 
tion with them as to inform them, at second hand or at third 
hand, which of the measures that he had empowered his cabi- 
net to introduce they were to impede and, if possible, to de- 
feat; and what minister whom he had spoken fair in the 
closet they were to worry in Parliament and malign at the 
clubs. Of the politicians whom this sj^stem bred and fostered, 
no one who appreciates what is most valuable in our national 
form of government and most honorable in our national char- 
acter has ever yet brought himself to speak with patience. 
The "immortal infamy," prophesied for them by tlie far- 
siglited among their contemporaries, has been conferred on 



110 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

thein in overflowing measure bj tlie greatest prose-Avriters of 
the nation which they disgraced and well-nigh mined. But 
the closely reasoned and brilliantly worded invectives in -which 
Burke and Macaulay have done for the king's friends what 
Tacitus did for the informers of the Roman empire are not 
so damaging to George tlie Third and his political retainers 
as the unstudied expressions of vexation, and even of anguish, 
wdiich w^ere WTung from the lips of statesmen who had been 
stabbed in the back at the instigation of a master whom they 
were faithfully and diligently serving. Lord Rockingham, in 
his quiet way, told his sovereign to his face tliat the efforts of 
liis Majesty's ministers had been thwarted by the officers of 
his Majesty's household, " acting together like a corps." Lord 
JN'orth, piqued by the inspired insolence of a subordinate place- 
man, complained, w^ith more of metaphor than was usual to 
him, that his pillow was full of thorns. And Mr. Grenville, 
who had a temj^er wutli which neither king nor king's favor- 
ite did well to trifle, declared straight out that he would not 
hold powder at the w^ill of a set of Janizaries who miglit at 
an_y moment be ordered to put the bowstring round his neck. 
The king maintained his parliamentary body-guard in a 
state of admirable discipline. As James the Second was his 
own minister of marine, and William the Third his own for- 
eign secretary, so George the Third selected as his special de- 
partment the manipulation of the House of Commons. He 
furnished the means, and minutely audited the expenditure, 
of corruption. He protected and prolonged a bad system 
wdiich, but for him, would have died an earlier death by at 
least sixteen years. Every reformer of abuses who had got 
hold of a thread in the web of bribery and jobbery which was 
strangling the commonwealth was discouraged from follow- 
ing up his clew by the certainty that it would lead him sooner 
or later to the door of the royal closet. The king knew the 
secret history of all the hucksters of politics — the amount at 
which they aj^praised themselves, the form in which they had 
got their price, and the extent to which they were earning 
their pay by close attendance and blind subservience. There 
never was a patronage secretary of the old school who might 



Chap. IV.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. Ill 

not have sat at his feet with advantage, lie had the true 
Treasury whip's e_ye for a division, and contempt for a de- 
bate. When he had studied the list of ayes and noes, and 
the names of the speakers for and against, he had sutticient 
materials to decide how he was to distribute his smiles and 
liis cold looks — who was to be enriched, who was to be warn- 
ed, and who was to be beggared. For arguments, however 
unanswerable — for protestations of loyalty, however sincere 
and pathetic — he cared as little as for the virtues and tlie 
deserts of those who had the misfortune to differ with him. 
He was never more inexorable than when dealing with the 
officers whose courage and conduct, by sea and land, had pre- 
pared for him so extensive an empire and so splendid a throne. 
Conway, wdiose name was a proverb for romantic daring,' lost 
his regiment and his place in the bedchamber because, in the 
debate on General Warrants, he stood by the liberties of his 
country as quietly and lirmly as he had confronted the clay- 
mores at Cullodeu and the Irish bayonets at Fontenoy. Barre, 
Avith a French bullet still in his face, begged the speaker no 
longer to address him by his military title, since, by voting 
for Wilkes, he had forfeited the rank and the employment 
which had been bestowed on him as the brother in arms of 
Wolfe. But summary dismissal, inflicted, in order to point 
the example, the most ruthlessly upon those who had the 
most distinguished services or the largest families, was not the 
only expedient adopted in order to deter officers from doing 
their duty as members of Parliament. Their sovereign had in 
store for them another mark of his displeasure, Avhich they 
felt as perhaps only soldiers can feel it. " The last division," 
wrote George to his minister (and it was a specimen letter) 
" was nearer than some persons w^ill have expected, but not 
more than I thought. I hope every engine will be employed 

' " I don't pretend," said a sufficiently brave officer, " to be like Harry 
Conway, wlio walks np to the mouth of a cannon with as much coolness 
and grace as if he was going to dance a minuet." At the battle of Laf- 
felt, the Steenkirk of the eighteenth century, Conway got so near death 
that one French hussar had him by the hair while the sword-point of 
another was at his breast. 



112 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

to get tliose friends that stayed away last night to come and 
support on Monday. I wish a list could be prepared of those 
who went away, and those that deserted to the minority. 
That would be a rule for my conduct in the drawing-room to- 
morrow." When the king, amidst a circle of exultant place- 
men, turned his back upon men who had never turned theirs 
upon his enemies, and sent them home to read in the Gazette 
that some holiday hero who had never marched farther afield 
than Ilounslow had been promoted over their heads, they 
would carry their grievance to the minister at whose com- 
mand they had sailed across the world to encounter the 
wounds and jungle fevers which were all that remained to 
them as the reward of lialf a score of campaigns. There is 
something indescribably pathetic in the little personal atten- 
tions by which Lord Chatham, in his helplessness and isola- 
tion, endeavored to repay to the slighted and injured veterans 
some part of that debt of gratitude which his sovereign had 
thought fit to repudiate.' 

' In 1773 Chatham drafted a memorial Avith his own hand for an ofRcer 
who had been passed over for political reasons — " a wanton species of 
oppression," he says, " fatal to the army or the constitution." "If the 
spirit of service," he writes in another place, " could be killed in an Eng- 
lish army, such strokes of wanton injustice would bid fair for it." In the 
same year his sympathy was requested for the half-pay captains in the 
navy who had been rudely shown the door by a ministry which was on 
the eve of a war that reft from England the half of Chatham's conquests. 
"• With these men," wrote Barre, " your lordship gave law to the world. 
Your bungling successors are perfectly ignorant of the use or application 
of such valuable instruments." One method Ijy which Chatham gratified 
the old partners and instruments of his renown was by hanging their 
portraits in a place of honor in his house at Burton Pynsent. A compli- 
ment of this nature, paid to Admiral Saunders, who had commanded at 
Quebec, called from him a letter which breathed salt in every line. " Y^ou 
have put," he writes, " a plain seaman under great difficulties. I assure 
you I find it a great deal harder to make a proper answer to your lord- 
ship's civilities than to execute any orders I ever received from you. 
Y'our lordship has made an exchange with me that I am a gainer by in 
every way. Y^ou have my picture, and I will keep your lordship's letter 
as a thing I am at least as proud of as of the mark I wear of the king's 
approbation of the services I meant to do in that time which was truly 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 113 

To those who can for a moment forget the misfortunes 
which the perversity of George the Third entailed upon his 
country, there is an element of the comical in the roundness 
and vehemence with which he invariably declared himself 
upon the wrong side in a controversy. "Whether he was pre- 
dicting that the publication of debates would "annihilate the 
House of Commons, and thus put an end to the most excel- 
lent form of government which has been established in this 
kingdom ;" or denouncing the " indecency " of a well-mean- 
ing senator who had protested against the double impropriety 
of establishing State lotteries, and then using them as an en- 
gine for bribing members of Parliament ; or explaining the 
reluctance of an assembly of English gentlemen and land- 
owners to plunder the Duke of Portland of his estates by the 
theory that there was no " truth, justice, and even honor " 
among them — he displayed an inability to tolerate, or even to 
understand, any view but his own which can only be account- 
ed for by the reflection that he was at the same time a partisan 
and a monarch. He never could forgive a politician for tak- 
ino: the rio-ht course, unless it was taken from a wrong motive. 
AVhen the Protestant Dissenters applied to be emancipated 
from the obligation of subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles, tlie 
king, at the same time that he directed Lord Xorth to see that 
the bill for their relief was lost in the House of Lords, desired 
him not to be hard upon those well-affected gentlemen who 
owed their seats to the Nonconformists. Even at the risk of 
encouraging the advocates of a measure which his Majesty 
dreaded as a blow to religion and detested as an innovation, 
nothing must be done to diminish the majority in a future 
Parliament which would have to be relied upon for gagging 
the press in England and maintaining the tea-duty in Amer- 
ica. For George the Third was, before everything, an elec- 
tioneerer. He had the names and the figures of all the con- 
glorious. I am more pleased with your thinking me a friend to liberty 
than with all the rest. I am so to the bottom, and you may depend upon 
it. I think the country can have no glory without it." Saunders had 
suffered for his opinions, and if he had lived longer would undoubtedly 

have suffered more. 

8 



114 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

stituencies at bis fingers' ends, and the consciences of a good 
many of them in his pocket. He was at home in the darkest 
corners of the political workshop, and up to the elbows in 
those processes which a high-minded statesman sternlj for- 
bids, and which even a statesman who is not high-minded 
leaves to be conducted by others. We find him paving the 
way for a new contest in a county by discharging the out- 
standing debts of the last candidate ; helping the members of 
a manufacturing town to keep their seats at a general election, 
and contributing to the expense of defending them against a 
petition which, no doubt, had been richly deserved ; subsidiz- 
ing the patron of a borough with a grant out of the privy 
purse, and then, on the eve of a change of government, hud- 
dling away every trace of a bargain which would not endure 
the inspection of an honest minister; and writing, with the 
pen of an English sovereign, to offer a subject some "gold 
pills" for the purpose of liocusing the freeholders. Never 
very quick to pardon, he would not hear of an excuse from 
those who had crossed him in his character of a parliamentary 
agent. J^egge, during the great war with France, had directed 
w^ith consummate ability the finance of the most successful 
government that ever took ofiice ; but he had refused his sup- 
port to a Jacobite whom Lord Bute was scheming to bring in 
for Hampshire, and the new reign had not lasted six months 
before the unhappy Chancellor of the Exchequer found to his 
cost that the George the Third did not intend to drop the 
electioneering feuds of the Prince of Wales. At the interview 
which he obtained in order to tender: his enforced resignation, 
the fallen minister assured his Majesty that his future life 
would evince the sincerity of his loyalty. " JSTothing but your 
future life," was the ungracious reply, " can conciliate the bad 
impression I have received of you." 

A king so formidable, so pertinacious, so insatiable of pow- 
er, and so very far from particular as to the means which 
he employed in the pursuit of it, found little to resist him 
in the base and shifting elements of which public life was 
composed in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. As 
year by year he gathered strength, he grew ever bolder in the 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 115 

use of it, and more hostile to those who had the magnanimity 
to resist his seductions and the courage to thwart his will. 
For, among the mob of high-born self-seekers and needy ad- 
venturers who hustled each other round the tlirone, the dig- 
nity of English statesmanship was still upheld by a few men 
to whom their bitterest enemies never denied the praise of 
being faithful to their opinions and to each other. The nu- 
cleus of the Liberal party, as it has existed ever since, w\as 
formed during the turbid and discreditable period that inter- 
vened between tlie fall of Pitt in 1761 and the fall of Gren- 
ville in 1765. Loathing the corruption which was rising 
around them like a noisome tide, and foreseeing the perils of 
that deliberate warfare against the freedom of the press which 
began with the arrest of Wilkes, and ended, after the lapse of 
more than half a centnry, with the acquittal of William Hone, 
a small knot of friends found themselves drawn together fully 
as much by moral as by political sympathy. High in rank, 
with rare exceptions ; young in years ; and most of them too 
rich, and all too manly, to be purchased, their programme, as 
now it would be called, consisted in little more than a deter- 
mination to prove to the world that there yet remained some- 
body who might be trusted. The opinions and aspirations of 
the Duke of Eichmond, Lord John Cavendish, and Sir George 
Savile are clearly set forth in a confidential letter addressed 
by the Duke of Portland to their common chief, the Marquis 
of Rockingham : " As to the .young men of property, and in- 
dependent people in both Houses, it is holding out a banner 
for them to come to, where interest cannot be said to point 
out the way, and where nothing but public good is to be 
sought for on the plainest, honestest, and most disinterested 
terms." The creed up to which these men endeavored to 
act was embodied by Burke in a single sentence. " The prin- 
ciples of true politics," he said, "are those of morality en- 
larged, and I neither now do, nor ever will, admit of any oth- 
er " — a doctrine which in our day has been repeated almost in 
the same words by another great spokesman of the same party.' 

' " It is not only true in morals," said Mr. Bright, in 1877, " but true in 



116 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

These sentiments might have been mistaken for the com- 
monplaces of opposition by such as were old enough to re- 
member how the patriots of 1740 talked while they were on 
the left hand of the Speaker, and how they acted after they 
had taken their seats on the Treasury bench ; but Lord Kock- 
ingham and his followers had been in office just long enough 
to show that, when they crossed the floor of the House, they 
did not leave their principles behind them. They came to 
the rescue at a moment when the enforcement of the Stamp 
Act in America had brought the empire to the very verge of 
civil war, and when the violent and despotic proceedings in 
which the prosecution of Wilkes had involved the executive 
government had agitated the mind of England with alarm 
and disaffection. In that dark hour George the Third be- 
sought Lord Rockingham to stand between him and the re- 
sentment of his subjects, at home and across the seas. The 
proposal to saddle themselves with the responsibility of striv- 
ing to undo the consequences of foolish and criminal measures 
which they had strenuously opposed had no great charms for 
men all of whom valued their reputation, and some their ease, 
a great deal more than anything which office could bring 
them. Nothing, said Burke, but the strongest sense of their 
duty to the public could have prevailed upon them to under- 
take the king's business at such a time. Unattractive, how- 
ever, as the invitation was, it was frankly and loyally accepted. 
The colonies were pacified by timely conciliation ; measures 
were taken to guard against the repetition of those encroach- 
ments on personal liberty which had set the nation in a blaze ; 
and, as soon as his crown was once more secure, the king be- 
gan to plot the destruction of the ministry which had saved 
him. Lord Kockingham by his wise and courageous policy 
had earned the confidence, and even the affection, of the peo- 
ple ; but, in the phrase of the day, he had ruined himself in 
the closet. (3ne who lived behind the scenes for twenty years 
was accustomed to say that a man in office who could bring 

statesmanship; and, in flict, I would not dissociate them at all — what is 
true in morals from what is true in statesmanshii)." 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 117 

himself to utter tlie simple form of words "That is wrong" 
would carry his point in council though everybody was against 
him. Lord Rockingham was a brief, a bad, and a most reluc- 
tant speaker ; but he had a way of listening to a questionable 
proposal w^hicli was more alarming to George the Third even 
than the eloquence of Pitt or the lengthiness of Grenville. 
A sovereign who had it in view to appoint a young gentle- 
man of fourteen, the heir to a pocket-borough, comptroller of 
petty customs in the port of London, or to confer a secret 
pension on a member of Parliament who was not yet prepared 
to let it be known that he had changed his party, naturally 
liked to be met half-way by his confidential adviser. But 
Lord Kockingham, who to the end of his life found it difficult 
enough to express his thoughts, never rose to the higher art 
of concealing them ; and the monarch very soon acquired a 
dread of his amiable and modest servant, the frequent mani- 
festation of whicli is a high and involuntary tribute to the 
power of unswerving and unassuming virtue. 

The Rockinghams took office in the summer of 17G5, and 
by Christmas the king had made up his mind to be rid of 
them. As soon as Parliament assembled after the holidays, 
he set his accustomed machinery to Avork. The farce began 
by the master of the harriers begging an audience for the 
purpose of humbly acquainting his Majesty that his convic- 
tions would not allow him to support the repeal of the Stamp 
Act. His Majesty, witli the air of a Henry the Fourth com- 
mending and forgiving a Chief-justice Gascoigne, assured his 
faithful retainer that he was at liberty to follow the dictates 
of his conscience. Having obtained their cue, the king's 
friends voted in a body against the king's ministers ; but 
the consequences of a breach with America, as expounded 
by Burke and Pitt in speeches of extraordinary force, con- 
vinced a nation which still was more prudent than its sover- 
eign, and the attempt to save the stamp-duty was defeated 
by a clear majority of two to one. George the Third, in his 
disgust and disappointment, at once fell intriguing in every 
direction against his own cabinet. Bute, Bedford, and Gren- 
ville became in turn the object of his advances ; but none the 



lis THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

less did he continue to smile npon the servants whom he was 
eagerly making an opportunity to discharge. " The late good 
old king," said Chatham, in the House of Lords, "had some- 
thing about him by which it was possible for you to know 
whether he liked you or disliked you;" but in this respect 
tlie reigning monarch did not take after his grandfather. 
Lord Rockingham afterwards declared that he had never en- 
joyed such distinguished marks of the royal kindness as dur- 
ing a period when the influence of Great Britain was para- 
lyzed in every foreign capital by the knowledge that the 
existing prime-minister would not remain in office ten min- 
utes after a successor could be found for him, and wlien all 
the placemen of the king's faction were openly denouncing 
and obstructing the government. Dyson, the king's spokes- 
man in the Commons, and Lord Eglinton, his acknowledged 
agent in the Lords, carried on a persistent and vexatious oj)- 
position which would have been contemptible if maintained 
on their own account, but which rendered legislation next to 
impossible when it was notorious that they had the court be- 
hind them. Lord Strange, the Chancellor of the Duchy of 
Lancaster, went about everywhere asserting, with the air of 
one who was fresh from a confidential interview, that when 
they claimed tlie royal sanction for the repeal of the Stamp 
Act, the ministers had been taking a liberty with tlie name 
of their sovereign. Lord Rockingham was not the man to 
curry favor by passing himself off as the dupe of a perfidy 
which was almost insolent in its transparence. Lie refused 
to leave the presence until his Majesty had disavowed Lord 
Strange in his own hand on three separate scraps of paper, 
which are still in existence, worth exactly as much as they 
were on the day when they were written. He never saw the 
king without demanding that the mutineers should be brought 
to order, and never quitted him without an assurance that 
their conduct was shameful, and a promise that the next 
fault should be their last.' But at length the plot was ripe, 

' On one occasion Rockingham came to the palace primed with a fla- 
grant case of iusuborclinatiou ou the part of Lord Eglinton. " Oh," said 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 119 

and its projector no longer bad need to dissemble. Early in 
July, 17(30, Lord Chancellor N'ortliington, ill at ease with col- 
leagues whose public spirit was as little to his taste as the 
decency of their private habits, got up a quarrel with them 
over a proposed code for Canada, absented liimself from their 
councils, and on hearing that the cabinet had met without 
him, swore roundly that it should never meet again. Next 
morning he drove to Richmond, advised the king to send for 
Pitt, and assisted in the concoction of a letter inviting the 
Great Commoner to place himself at the head of "an able and 
dignified " government ; and on the same evening George the 
Third dismissed his ministers without a sentence of thanks, a 
word of apology, or a syllable of explanation beyond the sin- 
gularly timed remark that he had not two faces. The chan- 
cellor was loaded with pensions and sinecures as the wages of 
his treachery ; but Lord Kockingham and his friends gained 
nothing by their year of power except the consciousness of 
having done their best to serve a master who was the reverse 
of grateful. Alone among all the administrations which pre- 
ceded them and several which followed them, they went out 
of office, the poor among them as poor and the rich no richer 
than they had entered it; having done more for the advan- 
tage of the nation by setting its rulers an example of disinter- 
estedness than if they had succeeded in placing half a score of 
useful and enlightened measures on the pages of the Statute- 
book.' 



the king, "that is abominable; but Eglinton is angry with me too. He 
says I have uot done enough for him." George the Third at last went so 
far as to pledge himself that if Dyson did not mend his ways he should 
go in the course of the next winter ; but by that time his Majesty clearly 
foresaw that Lord Rockingham himself would not outlast the autumn. 

* The political satire of the day swarms with passages indicating the 
light in which George the Tliird was regarded by his subjects at the pe- 
riod when he held the purse-strings of bribery, committed the welfore of 
his kingdom to Sandwich and Grafton, and conspired with Northingtou 
and Rigby against Burke and Rockingham. 

" Of vice the secret friend, the foe professed; 
Of every talent to deceive possessed ; 



120 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

And now the king's theory of what a ministry onght to be 
was tested under the most favorable possible circumstances as 
against the theory of Burke. Party, said Burke, is a body of 
men united to promote the national interest by their joint en- 
deavors upon some particular principle in which they are all 
agreed. Party, said his Majesty, is a body of men combined 
to hinder a beneficent ruler from selecting for public employ- 
ment the best and wisest of his subjects, wherever he can 
meet with them. The Earl of Chatham (for by that name 
Pitt was thenceforward known) had so small a personal fol- 
lowing that his only resource was to patch up a government 
out of the most respectable odds and ends on which he could 
lay his hands. He would gladly have strengthened his cab- 
inet by a large draft from the ranks of the late administra- 
tion ; but most of Lord Kockingham's friends preferred to 
retire with their leader, amidst the contemptuous astonishment 
of political mankind.' Conway and the Duke of Portland 

As mean in liousehold savings as profuse 
In vile corruption's scandalous abuse ; 
Mentally blind ; on whom no ray of truth 
E'er glanced auspicious e'en in bloom of youth. 
What though inimitable Churchill's hearse 
Saved thee from all the vengeance of his verse ? 
Macaulay shall in nervous prose relate 
Whence flows the venom that distracts the State." 

These lines, given to the world in 1770, refer to Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, 
once famous as the republican chronicler of the Stuarts. Wilkes called 
her a noble historian. Franklin, in a letter to the newspapers, speaks of 
"future Livys, Humes, Robertsons, and Macaulaj-s, who may be inclined 
to furnish the world with that rara avis, a true history." Gray thought 
her book " the most sensible, unaffected, and best history of England that 
we have had yet." The poor lady is now remembered solely as the ob- 
ject of some of Dr. Johnson's coarsest, but certainly not his least amus- 
ing, jokes; but the prediction contained in the couplets quoted above 
was fulfilled with curious completeness in Lord Macaulay's second essay 
on Chatham. 

' " The Duke of Richmond, Sir George Savile, and Lord John Caven- 
dish," said Walpole, " were devoted to their party, and from that point 
of honor, wdiicli did little to their judgment, remained inflexibly attached 
to that poor creature, Lord Rockingham." Nothing more forcibly brings 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 121 

remained, bitterly to regret ere long tliat they had separated 
themselves from their former colleagues ; and the Duke of 
Grafton, shaking himself free from associates whose influence 
had hitherto preserved him from himself, surrendered — little 
as he then knew it — his last chance of descending to posterity 
as a reputable statesman. Poor Charles Townshend, who as 
successor of Lord Holland had been revelling in the easy prof- 
its of the Pay-office, was unceremoniously thrust up into the 
barren and laborious duties of Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
From among his own adherents Chatham nominated Barre to 
high and Lord Shelburne to exalted office ; while Lord ]^orth- 
ington reeled down into the presidency of the council, to 
make room on the woolsack for Lord Camden, who had shown 
his independence on the bench by discharging Wilkes from 
imprisonment, and in the House of Lords by denying the 
right of Parliament to tax America. 

The experiment of a government based upon what George 
the Third called the principle, and Burke the cant, of " Not 
men, but measures," could not have been more fairly tried or 
have resulted in more rapid and hopeless failure. An admin- 
istration whose original members had ability far above the 
average, and characters for the most part irreproachable 
enough to have qualified them for sitting in a modern cab- 
inet, passed no laws that were not bad, took no important step 
that was not disastrous, and in little more than two years, by 
the gradual elimination of its nobler elements, had degener- 
ated into an unscrupulous and unhonored cabal. Before the 
end of the fourth month one of those disagreements which 
were of weekly occurrence in Lord Chatham's motley and ill- 
assorted troop led to the retirement of all who had tempora- 
rily transferred their allegiance from Lord Rockingham to his 
successor ; all, that is to say, but Conway, whom his evil gen- 
ius, Horace Walpole, persuaded to hold his ground until he 



out tlie degradation into which our jDublic life had fallen since the great 
days of the seventeenth century than such a sneer in the mouth of one 
who affected, at any rate, to admire the mutual fidelity of Pym, Hamp- 
den, and Eliot. 



122 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

could no longer retreat with credit. Kext, tlie prime-minister, 
under the burden of a mysterious affliction, withdrew himself 
from spoken and at last even written communication with his 
bewildered cabinet, and left the field open for Townshend's 
fantastic cleverness and unspeakable folly. But death carried 
off Townshend before the laughter which greeted his cham- 
pagne speech had well died away, and while men still believed 
that in imposing a tea-duty on the American colonies he had 
done a smart stroke for the benefit of the English Exchequer ; 
and Lord North, who had all the qualities of a public man 
which Townshend lacked except public spirit, took the vacant 
place at the Exchequer. The Duke of Grafton, who was First 
Lord of the Treasury, and as much the head of the govern- 
ment as anybody could be at a time when a good fit of the 
gout might at any moment restore Lord Chatham to himself, 
now" began seriously to look about for fresh recruits to supply 
the places of those who had fallen or deserted. Prepared, in 
his distress, to offer the very best of terms, he instinctively 
turned to the Bedfords. With them, as every parliamentary 
tactician knew, it was a question of the bounty-money, and 
not of the banner. They were always to be had ; but, as has 
been wittily and compactly said, they were to be had onl}' in 
the lot. Their unrivalled knowledge of the market had taught 
them that by sticking together they would each of them get 
quite as much and keep it twice as long. An attempt already 
had been made to bring about an alliance between them and 
the Kockingharas ; but the Duke of Bedford insisted as a 
preliminary condition that Conway should be displaced in 
order to make room for the whole of his own connection ; 
and the negotiation was broken off because Lord Rockingham, 
with rare nobility of mind, declined to sacrifice an old com- 
rade who had sacrificed him.' Grafton, with nothing to for- 

^ The accounts whicli have been left of this conference of July 20, 
1767, forcibly illustrate the morals and manners of the Bloomsbury gang, 
as they were called from the London residence of their leader. The Duke 
of Bedford, who was worthy of better clients, made a feeble effort to ar- 
rive at an understanding with Lord Rockingham about a common pol- 
icy ; but he could not keeji his followers for five minutes together off the 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 123 

give, was less considerate ; and in January, 1TG7, the entire 
Bloomsbury contingent marched into the ministerial camp 
over Conway's prostrate body. Lord Gower became president 
of the Council in tlie room of Lord Northington, who carried 
down into Llampshire for the solace of his declining years a 
cellar of port and a budget of loose stories which, if he had 
remained in place, would have been critically appreciated by 
his new colleagues. Rigby, who had the promise of the Paj^- 
ofBce and the immediate enjoyment of an Irish vice-treasurer- 
ship, refused to kiss hands until Conway had ceased to be sec- 
retary of state ; and the seals were accordingly at once handed 
to Lord Weymouth, while Lord Satidwich took over the salary 
and the patronage of the Post-office. The first Parliament of 
George the Third was now fast running to an end. A disso- 
lution was at hand, and the incoming postmaster -general 
learned with dismay that the Statute-book forbade him to 
make use of his official authority for the furtherance of polit- 
ical objects. When boroughs were in question. Sandwich cared 
nothing for the spirit of the law ; but as he had just enough 
respect for the letter to keep within it, he resolved to see the 
elections out before assuming nominal possession of a dignity 
every atom of the solid influence attached to which he was 
determined ruthlessly to employ in the interests of his party. 

subject that was next their hearts. Rigby bade the two noblemen take 
the court calendar and give their friends one, two, and three tliousand a 
year all round. Not a single member, he declared, of the present cabinet 
should be saved. " What," interposed Dowdeswell, " not Charles Towns- 
hend?" "Oh," said Rigby, "that is different. He has been in oj^posi- 
tion." " So has Conway," cried Dowdeswell. " But Conway is Bute's 
man," was the reply. "Pray," was the rejoinder, "is not Charles Towns- 
hend Bute's ?" " Ay, but Conway is governed by his brother, who is 
Bute's." " So is Townshend by his brother, who is Bute's." " But Lady 
Ailesbury is a Scotchwoman." " So is Lady Dalkeith." Any one who 
turns from this despicable wrangle to Lord Stanhoi)e's narrative of the 
overtures made by Pitt to the Whigs in 1804, and of the spirit in which 
they were received, may estimate the reformation which forty years had 
wrought in the tone of English politics; and, to whatever party he may 
himself belong, he will acknowledge the debt which, on that score if on 
no other, our country owes to Fox. 



124: THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

The general election wliicli was held in the spring of 1768 
disclosed a state of things most alarming to all except the 
dull, the thoughtless, and the dishonest. There was nothing 
fanciful in the parallel which it pleased contemporary writers 
to draw between the England of Chatham and the Rome of 
Pompey and Lucullus. Once again in the course of the 
world's history immense foreign conquests had been made by 
a free and self-governing people. Once again political insti- 
tutions which had serv^ed their purpose as a machinery for 
enabling a nation to conduct its domestic affairs were exposed 
to a sudden and unexpected strain by the additional burden 
of a vast external empire. And once again the spoils of dis- 
tant provinces were brought home to purchase the votes of 
electoral bodies, incaptble of dischai'ging or even understand- 
ing their increased responsibilities, and altogether out of sym- 
pathy with what was most intelligent and respectable in the 
community. The unreformed constituencies of England and 
Scotland no more represented the British energy, foresight, 
and valor which had triumphed under Olive and Ilawke than 
the corrupt mob which gave its suffrages to the candidate who 
distributed the largest doles, exhibited the most numerous 
pairs of gladiators, and threw open the stateliest public baths 
for the lowest fees had a right to speak for the Marsian far- 
mers and Ligurian mariners whose swords and oars had recon- 
quered Spain and conquered Asia. The offices of electioneer- 
ing ao-ents had been besicired through the winter which pre- 
ceded the election by rich army contractors eager to sit in the 
first Parliament that had been chosen since the Peace of Paris 
had allowed them to wind up their accounts with the War- 
office ; by planters wdio had acquired their notions of constitu- 
tional government in the management of a sugar-estate in 
Barbadoes ; by members of council from Calcutta and Ma- 
dras wdio, out of a nominal salary of thirty pounds a month, 
accumulated baronial and even ducal revenues so fast that the 
directors complained that none but inexperienced j'ouths re- 
mained beyond the seas to fill the most elevated posts in the 
service of the Compan3^ The country was literally deluged 
with money. "Without connections," said Lord Chatham, 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 125 

" witliout any natural interest in the soil, the importers of 
foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a 
torrent of corruption as no private hereditary fortune could 
resist." The sums lavished upon bribery in the counties and 
the great cities exceeded all that had been heard of in the 
past, and the patrons of close boroughs got anything they 
liked to name. George Selwyn received nine thousand pounds 
for the double seat at Ludgershall. The Mayor and Aldermen 
of Oxford, with a sort of perverted public spirit, refused to 
elect any candidate who would not undertake to assist them 
in wiping off their town debt. Some boroughs were adver- 
tised in the news]3apers ; others were negotiated on the com- 
mercial-travelling system by attorneys who w^ent a round of 
the country-houses on horseback ; ' a great change since the 
autumn of 1640, when Pym and Hampden rode up and down 
England to promote the election of stanch and trustworthy 
Puritans, " wasting their bodies much in carrying on the 
cause." Wilkes, in a piece marked by more humor than del- 
icacy (which, to do him justice, was seldom the case with what 
he gave to print), challenged his readers to deny that a share 
in the British legislature was bought and sold as publicly as a 
share in the New liiver Company. It fared ill with those 
noblemen and gentlemen who had been looking forward to 
the dissolution as an opportunity of giving their heirs the ad- 
vantage of a senatorial career. Lord Chesterfield applied be- 
times to a parliamentary jobber with an offer of five-and- 
twenty hundred pounds if a safe seat could be provided for 
young Mr. Stanhope, whose education had by this time been 
brought to as high a point as nature seemed willing to sanc- 
tion ; but the man told him plainly that already there was no 
such a thing as a borough to be had, since the East and West 
Indians had secured them all at the rate of three, four, and (as 
the market hardened) of five thousand pounds a seat.^ 

' Hickey, the most notorious of these fellows, survives iu Goldsmith's 
" Retaliation," with the character of " a blunt pleasant creature," and in 
company that is far too good for him. 

^ '■'■Mayor. But, after all. Master Touchit, I am not so over-fond of these 
nabobs. For my part. I had rather sell myself to somebody else. 



126 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

There was one father who had no intention of allowing any 
difficulty about money to interfere with his ideas of paternal 
duty. Five thousand pounds were the same as five hundred 
to Lord Holland, when it w^as a question of doing something 
to make Charles a man before his time. Though the lad had 
barely turned nineteen when Parliament was dissolved, a 
family arrangement was made for introducing him into pub- 
lic life as soon as he cared to enter it. Lord Ilch ester was 
anxious to find some serious occupation for his son, Lord 
Stavordale, who was very little older than Charles, and had 
plunged almost as deep in the pleasures of the town ; so the 
two brothers clubbed together to hire their boys a borough, as 
they might have rented them a manor to shoot over in the 
vacation. They selected Midhurst, the most comfortable of 
constituencies from the point of view of a representative ; for 
the right of election rested in a few score of small holdings, 
on which no human being resided, distinguished among the 
pastures and stubbles that surrounded them by a large stone 
set up on end in the middle of each portion. These burgage- 
tenures, as they were called, had all been bought up by a sin- 
gle proprietor. Viscount Montagu, who, when an election was 
in prospect, assigned a few of them to his servants with in- 
structions to nominate the members and then make back the 
property to their employer.' This ceremony was performed 
in March, 1768 ; and the steward of the estate, who acted as 
returning officer, declared that Charles James Fox had been 
duly chosen as one of the burgesses for Midhurst at a time 

" Touchit. And why so, Mr. Mayor ? 

" Mayor. I don't know. They do a mortal deal of harm m the country. 
"Why, wherever any of them settles, it raises the price of provisions for 
thirty miles round. People rail at seasons and crojDS. In my opinion, it 
is all along with these folks that things are so scarce. 

" Toucliit. You talk like a fool. Suppose they have mounted the beef 
and mutton a trifle. Ain't we obliged to them too for raising the value 
of boroughs ? You should always set one against t'other." — Foote, 
Nahoh, act ii., scene 2. 

' In the year 1794 the number of permanent voters for Midhurst was 
returned as one. By that time Lord Egremont had acquired the bur- 
gage-holds at a cost of forty thousand guineas. 



CiiAP.IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 127 

when that young gentleman was still amusing himself in 
Italy. He remained on the Continent during the opening- 
session of the new Parliament, which met in May in order to 
choose a speaker ' and transact some routine business ; and it 
was not until the following winter tliat he made his first ap- 
pearance upon a stage where, almost from the moment of his 
entry, he became the observed of all observers. 

Charles Fox began his political course utterly unprovided 
with any fixed set of political opinions. Older than his years 
in nothing but his looks and his opportunities, his outfit for 
the career of a statesman consisted in a few superficial preju- 
dices, the offspring rather of taste than of conviction ; a few 
personal alliances which he had formed for himself ; and not 
a few personal dislikes which he had, for the most part, in- 
herited from his father. Lord Holland, by this time, was the 
Ishmael of English politics. By Chatham, and Chatham's fol- 
lowing, he could not even hope to be forgiven. The unkind- 
ness, and, as he regarded it, the ingratitude, of the Bedfords 
forever rankled in his memory. Against the Grenvilles he 
had a grudge of a more solid nature. In November, 1764, it 
was intimated to George Grenville that Charles Townshend 
had his eye upon the Pay-oflice. " I rather understood," wrote 
the prime-minister's informant, " that he would be content to 
wait for Lord Holland's death. He said he wished him dead, 
and so he believed did everybody." But the paymaster's 
health, as we learn in a boyish letter from his son, mended 
during the winter; and in May, 17G5, the king, urged by 
Grenville, who was urged by Townshend, commanded him to 
resign the prize for the retention of which he had sacrificed 
the last shred of his reputation and become embroiled in the 
most disagreeable of his hundred quarrels. And, finally, when 
Grenville fell and was succeeded by Rockingham, Lord Hol- 

' They chose Sir John Cust, who went through the time-honored farce 
of self-depreciation, and duly submitted to be forced up the steps of the 
chair, expostulating with carefully graduated vehemence which grew 
fainter as lie ascended from the floor. The poor man had more reason 
for his reluctance than he knew of at the time, for a single session of 
Wilkes killed him. 



128 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

land made advances, equally unexpected and unwelcome, tow- 
ards a reconciliation with the party whom more than all others 
he had unpardonably injured — advances which the new min- 
ister received with a quiet scorn that brought painfully home 
to the old statesman tlie consciousness that he was feared as 
little as he was confided in, and honored even less than he 
was loved. 

With the capacity for self-deception which is nowhere so 
potent as in the breast of a politician, Lord Holhind contrived 
to regard himself as a good, easy man, upon whom the world 
had borne too hard. " Don't ever, Charles," he would say to 
his favorite boy, " make any exception, or trust as I did. 

' Of all court service know the common lot : 
To-day 'tis done ; to-morrow 'tis forgot.' 

Well ! I may thank myself, and have nothing to do but to 
forget it." Charles was quite prepared to resent the wrongs 
of a father from whom he had known nothing but kindness; 
and, with a strange ignorance of his own nature, looked upon 
himself as destined to live upon bad terms with nine out of 
ten of his equals and contemporaries. He could see no party 
wliich he was inclined to join, and no idol which he would 
condescend to worship. He dutifully refused to admire Chat- 
ham, though his animosity was softened when the caprice of 
that great man, by oversetting the Rockingham administra- 
tion, did something to expiate the slight which the Whigs 
had put upon Lord Holland. The Bedfords, one and all, he 
cordially detested. " As for politics," he writes from Florence 
to Macartney in 1767, "I am very little curious about them, 
for almost everything I hear at this distance seems unintelli- 
gible. I am ill-natured enough to be very sorry whenever I 
hear there is any chance of the Bedfords being pleased, and 
that is all I care about." " You said," he complains from 
l^aples to another correspondent, " you would write to me if 
you could find anything I should like to hear. In your last 
to Ste., you say the Bedfords have been cruelly used. Did 
you not think I should be glad to hear that? But I am sadly 
afraid you are imposed upon, and they have not been so ill- 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 129 

used as I always wish them to be. Let them feel how sharper 
than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless friend. Tliey 
arc now, I nnderstand, joined with Lord Kockingham, the 
only party whom they have not already tried at. Lord Bnte, 
the Duke of Grafton, and Lord Chatham have sent them 
empty away, and I hope and believe, if the others come in, 
they will serve them in the same manner." The letters which 
Charles Fox wrote and answered during the last twelve or 
fifteen months of the period which (little as he would have 
approved the expression) must be called his boyhood show 
that he was already keenly alive to politics, though his inter- 
est in them was entirely of a personal and petty description. 
He was greatly exercised about his father's ambition to ex- 
change his barony for an earldom, and it was at his sugges- 
tion that Lord Holland showed himself at court, in order to 
press his suit for a favor which was flatly and ungraciously 
refused.' When Lord Carlisle was made Knight Commander 
of the Thistle, his schoolfellow expressed his delight in a sen- 
tence that would have raised high the paternal hopes of Lord 
Chesterfield. "I think it," he says, "one of the best things 
that has been done this great while." But the very enthusi- 



^"Dear Charles," Lord Holland writes, "I hope I shall not mind it; 
but your advice has been followed with as bad success as possible. I was 
at court yesterday for the first, and I believe last, time. I had as much to 
say as any man ever had, and said it. I saw obstinate determined denial, 
without any reason given ; nor had I any occasion to follow your advice, 
' to take a shuffling answer for a denial,' for I was not flattered even by a 
shuffling answer, but told it would be very inconvenient to do it now, 
without being told why." At the time Lord Holland was learning from 
the royal lips how low he had fallen, his old rival was receiving, though 
not enjoying, the most signal homage that a sovereign ever paid to a sub- 
ject. Letters in the king's hand were going thrice a week to Lord Chat- 
ham, praying him to emerge from his retirement, if it were but for the 
sjjace of a single interview; entreating him to leave no means untried 
for restoring his invaluable health ; and earnestly beseeching him, if he 
could give nothing else, not to deprive his Majesty's government of the 
protection of his name. Such were now the relative positions of a jjair 
of statesmen who, ten years before, stood on a level in the estimation of 
mankind. 

9 



130 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

asm and energy with which he discoursed on coronets and 
green ribbons would have indicated to a discerning judge 
that Charles Fox was not the stuff out of which gold sticks 
are shaped. Making no pretension to a public spirit which 
seldom springs of itself in the breast of an English lad still in 
his teens, and which grows all the more healthily for not hav- 
ing been forced ; expatiating in a free, dashing style on what- 
ever happened to be the genuine humor of the moment ; 
throwing into the all-absorbing business of the private theat- 
ricals, wdiich were the special and time-honored pastime of his 
family, more heart and sense than can be found in all the Bed- 
ford and Grenville correspondence together — he gave promise 
of a sincerity, an audacity, an intensity, which would some day 
be unwonted and most salutary elements in the stagnant and 
vitiated atmosphere of St. Stephen's. 

Fox took his seat in November, 1768, and enrolled himself 
without hesitation in the ranks of the ministerialists. Lord 
Holland had chosen a most opportune moment for sending 
him into Parliament. In the opinion of that veteran place- 
man, there was only one bench in the House on which a wise 
man would care to sit ; but room would easily be found there 
for the son of one who had quarrelled to the death Avith al- 
most every possible prime- minister. If Chatham had still 
been at the head of affairs, and Shelburne secretary of state, 
Charles Fox could not have looked for office, and, indeed, 
would have had too much spirit to accept it ; but between the 
spring and the winter sessions of 1768 a great change had been 
effected in the constitution of the ministry. Lord Shelburne 
liad always desired to keep the Bedfords at a distance, and 
had been at daggers drawn with them ever since their intro- 
duction into the government. His faults and his virtues alike 
rendered it more than difficult for him to act with them as col- 
leagues. From the beginning to the end of Lord Shelburne's 
life fate seemed to have ordained that things should never go 
easily inside a cabinet which held him, and the key to that 
fatality is no longer a mystery. His racy and very candid 
autobiography bears on every page the impress of an acute, 
a forcible, and a most original intellect, which had failed to 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 131 

work itself free from conceit in the most subtle of all its in- 
numerable forms. A man who has too much sense to over- 
rate his own qualities will often make amends to his self- 
esteem by underrating his neighbor's ; and Lord Shelburne, 
while he had too strong a sense of the becoming to praise 
himself even in his private diary, could not endure to admit, 
with regard to others, that any fame was deserved, any mo- 
tives pure, or any conduct meritorious. While still a youth, 
he occasionally put enough restraint upon himself to preserve 
an outward show of respect for some powerful and eminent 
statesman who was old enough to be his father; but there 
was no reverence in his composition, and in his secret thoughts 
he had less mercy for his patrons than a reasonably good- 
natured politician bestows upon his adversaries. Lord Bute 
gave him his unreserved confidence at a time when that con- 
fidence was well worth having, and offered him high prefer- 
ment long before he had earned it by his public performances. 
Lord Chatham, against the wdsh of the king, made him secre- 
tary of state at nine-and-twenty ; and, in requital for their 
kindness, he amused the leisure of his later years by drawing 
characters of Bute and Chatham less pleasing than any which 
can be found elsewhere than on the fly-sheet of a lampoon. 
A man who lived so much in the world as Lord Shelburne 
could not conceal from the world so marked a feature of his 
disposition ; and his reputation for incurable treachery, for 
which nothing that he actually did, when judged by the stand- 
ard of his age, will sufficiently account, was principally due to 
the consciousness from which his political associates could not 
free themselves that, however fair he might speak them to 
their faces, at the bottom of his soul he regarded them as one 
less honest and less capable than the other. 

If Lord Shelburne (to borrow an expressive phrase from 
the dictionary of French politics) was a bad bedfellow under 
the most favorable circumstances, he was not likely to lie com- 
fortably with his head on the same bolster as the Bedfords. 
Constitutionally unable even to work for the good of the na- 
tion in hearty concert with men who desired to benefit the 
nation as sincerely and eagerly as himself, he found his posi- 



132 THE EARLY HlSTUllV OF [Chap. IV- 

tion intolerable in the midst of intriguers who grudged him 
his premature advancement, who scouted him because he was 
not of their clique, and who, if they had not dreaded him for 
his insight and ability, would have despised him for his pub- 
lic spirit ; for Shelburne, in his disinterested zeal for the ad- 
vantage of the commonwealth, was a generation ahead of his 
time. He was too clever to be blinded when any scheme for 
jDlundering the Exchequer was in train among those who were 
paid to protect it ; and there existed no means of buying the 
complicity of a great nobleman who was at the time so good 
a man of business that he knew how to live in style and in 
comfort on one fourth of the income which he drew from his 
estates.' This standing incompatibility in private aims was 
aggravated by differences of opinion on the gravest and most 
pressing matters of state. Nothing had done so much to em- 
phasize and promote the antipathy between his Majesty's 
ministry in London and his Majesty's subjects in America as 
the accession of the Be.dfords, who came into office breathing 
fire and fury against the recalcitrant colonies. Shelburne, the 
pupil of Chatham and the friend of Franklin, and one of the 
very few English statesmen who had taken the trouble to 
make himself master of a problem as intricate and momentous 
as ever statesmanship was called upon to solve, had come to the 
conclusion that timely and persistent measures of conciliation 
would mend the breach between the mother-country and her 
dependencies, without commissioning a single additional sloop 
of war, or putting another soldier on board a transport. Kigby, 
on the other hand, who cursed and swore when the repeal of the 
Stamp Act was alluded to in his presence, and Sandwich, who 
never spoke of the Americans except as rebels and cowards, 
openly proclaimed that three battalions and half a dozen frig- 
ates would soon bring New York and Massachusetts to their 
senses. They became ministers on an express understanding 

^ "Lord Shelburne," said .Johnson, "told me that a man of high rank 
who looks into his own aftairs may have all that he onght to have, all 
that can be of any use or appear with any advantage, for five thousand 
pounds a year." 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 133 

that the British govci-nment, in its dealings with tlie provin- 
cial assemblies, should thenceforward employ undisguised co- 
ercion and insist upon unconditional submission ; and they 
grasped at this congenial policy with the greater zest because 
they regarded it as one of the two levers which might be so 
wielded as to force Shelburnc out of the cabinet. 

They had another weapon forged to their hands in the ques- 
tion of Corsica. That island had long been rather a thorn 
than a jewel in the crown of its mistress, Genoa, who had 
enough ado to preserve her own independence without trench- 
ing upon the liberty of others. The Genoese, after more than 
one abortive negotiation, sold their intractable little dej)end- 
ency to Louis the Fifteenth — a bargain which ultimately 
proved serious for France and fatal to Genoa, inasmuch as 
one incident in the transaction was that J^apoleon Bonaparte 
was born a Frenchman. The agreement between dealer and 
customer was signed in May, 176S; but the delivery of the 
goods was a less easy matter. The islanders made a stout 
resistance ; their cause was dignified by the respectable char- 
acter, and recommended to the notice of Europe by the cos- 
mopolitan accomplishments, of their leader ; and the jealousy 
of England w^as especially excited by the prospect of her an- 
cient enemy acquiring a foothold in the Mediterranean. The 
attention of London society had been attracted to Corsica by 
a well-timed book of travels ; for Bosw^ell, who had been sent 
abroad to study law, had found his w\ay to Paoli's headquar- 
ters, and, returning home w^itli plenty to tell, had written 
what is still by far the best account of the island that has 
ever been published. Sympath}' for Corsica was as much the 
fashion with the English Whigs as sympathy for America 
became, seven years later, among the more enlightened mem- 
bers of the French nobilit}-. Burke lent his eloquence to the 
cause. The young Duke of Devonshire, then on his travels 
in Italy, assisted the patriots with money, and (which in his 
case was a much surer proof of devotion) gave himself the 
trouble of collecting subscriptions for their benefit. Chat- 
ham's old admirals, who had beaten the French three-deckers 
up and down the Channel, were wild at the notion of a fleet 



134 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CitAr. IV. 

of heavy-laden troop-ships being allowed to sail unmolested 
between Toulon and Ajaccio. The theory that British inter- 
ests would suffer by our acquiescence in the subjugation of 
Corsica — a theory which was backed by the high authority of 
Frederic the Great — was warmly urged by Shelburne in the 
cabinet, and would have prevailed but for the strenuous op- 
position of the Bedfords. Right or wrong, the party of neu- 
trality were supported by the mercantile community, who dur- 
ing a generation past had been fighting the French for one 
year out of every two, and. were in no hurry to begin again ; 
and by the Jacobites, wdio could not persuade themselves that 
it was safe to encourage people like the Corsicans, with so 
very much the air of insurgents about them, unless we were 
prepared to give at least the appearance of approval to the 
doctrine of lawful resistance. Lord Mansfield declared with 
satisfaction that the ministry was too weak, and the nation 
too wise, for war; and Dr. Johnson, the most pithy exponent 
of the common-sense view, whenever common-sense coincided 
with Toryism, shocked his ardent disciple almost out of his 
allegiance b}' bidding him mind his own affairs and leave the 
Corsicans to theirs.* 



' How real was tlie effect produced by BoswelFs narrative upon the 
opinion of his countrymen may be gathered from the unwilling testi- 
mony of those who regretted its influence, and thought little of its au- 
thor. " Foolish as we are," wrote Lord Holland, " we cannot be so fool- 
ish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in Corsica ; and yet, 
believe me, no better reason can be given for siding with the vile inhab- 
itants of one of the vilest islands of the world, wdio are not less free than 
all the rest of their neighbors, and whose island will enable the French 
to do no more harm than they may do us at any time from Toulon." 
Horace Walpole credited Boswell with having procured Paoli his pen- 
sion of a thousand a year from the British Exchequer. Gray confessed 
that the work had pleased and moved him strangely, and had shown 
that " any fool may write a most valuable book by chance if he will 
only tell us what he heard and saw with veracitj'." It is difficult to un- 
derstand how Gray could have failed to recognize in the volume which 
delighted him the indications of that rare faculty (whose component ele- 
ments the most distinguished critics have confessed themselves unable 
to analyze) which makes every composition of Boswell's readable, from 



Chap. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 135 

If Chatham liad been in a state to make himself even oc- 
casionally felt in the councils of the government, Shelburne, 
in spite of every species of annoyance and humiliation, would 
have stood to his post for the sake of preventing the terrible 
mischief which was sure to follow as soon as the Bedfords 
were in uncontested possession ; but before ]^ovember, 1768, 
the great orator was no longer a minister. For weeks past he 
liad never addressed the king except to renew his passionate 
and plaintive appeals to be relieved from the unendurable 
position of being called the ruler of the country when he had 
ceased for the time to be master of himself ; and he wrote to 
his colleagues only for the purpose of adjuring them to assist 
him in persuading his Majesty to accept the resignation of a 
useless and afflicted servant. At length George the Third 
humanely yielded ; Chatham was permitted to send back the 
privy seal ; Shelburne anticipated the machinations of his 
enemies by a voluntary retirement ; and if Lord Camden and 
Lord Granby had been prudent enough to follow his example, 
the cabinet, thougli it could boast no otlier merit, would at 
length have been homogeneous. Grafton became prime-min- 
ister as a matter of course ; and Charles Fox, whom at that 
age it was not easy to scandalize, readily attached himself to 
a leader whose bearing and address were as full of grace as 
his conduct was devoid of it, and whose public errors, as the 
event showed, were due to infirmity of purjDose rather than to 
perverseness of disposition.' In the full belief that Provi- 
dence had cut him out for a placeman, the young man sat 
himself down behind a government which he was willing to 
serve as a partisan, and of which he had every intention ere 
long to be a member. 



what he intended to be a grave argument on a point of hxw down to his 
most slipshod verses and his silliest letters. 

^ After a parliamentary experience of seven years, Fox, who was not 
given to flatter}', assured the Duke of Grafton that he regarded him as 
" a person with whom I have always wished to agree, and with whom I 
should act with more pleasure in any possible situation than with any 
pne I have been acquainted with." 



136 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IV. 

If he had not been so fortunate as to find a minister in 
power whom considerations of filial piety allowed him to sup- 
port, Fox was quite prepared to head a party of his own, and, 
if he failed in that, to be a party by himself. It would be 
useless to try his proceedings during the five years of his first 
Parliament by the rules of criticism wdiich govern our judg- 
ment in the case of mature statesmen. His defects and his 
virtues, his appalling scrapes and his transcendent perform- 
ances, as with all men of exceptional vigor under four-and- 
twenty, were the inevitable outcome of his temperament. 
Those who would call Fox conceited because, at an age when 
he should still have been minding his Aristotle, he thought 
himself the match for any opponent and the man for any of- 
fice, might apply the same epithet to Nelson wdien he an- 
nounced that, if he lived, he would be at the top of the tree ; 
to Byron when he bearded the EdhiburgJi liemew ; or to 
Shelley when he introduced himself by letter to every philos- 
opher of reputation whom he deemed worthy of being con- 
sulted on the prospects of human perfectibility. With health 
such as falls to the lot of one in ten thousand, spirits which 
sufficed to keep in good-humor through thirty years of oppo- 
sition the most unlucky company of politicians that ever ex- 
isted, and courage that did not know the meaning of fear or 
the sensation of responsibility, there was nobody whom Charles 
Fox shrank from facing, and nothing wdiich he did not feel 
himself equal to accomplish. He, if any one, was a living il- 
lustration of Emerson's profound remark, that success is a con- 
stitutional trait.' He succeeded because all the world in con- 



^ " We must reckon success a constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust 
health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and thirty 
years old, at his departure from Greenland he will steer west, and his 
ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in a stronger 
and bolder man, and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fif- 
teen hundred miles farther, and reach Labrador and New England. 
There is no chance in results. With adults, as with children, one class 
enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the whirling world ; the 
others have cold hands, and remain bystanders. The first wealth is 
health. Sickness is poor-spirited. It must husband its resources to live. 



CuAr. IV.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 137 

cert could not have kept him in the background ; and be- 
cause, when once in the front, he played his part with a 
prompt intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the 
outward symptoms of the immense reserves of energy on 
which it was in his power to draw. He went into the House 
of Commons, as into the hunting-field, glowing with anticipa- 
tions of enjoyment, and resolved that nothing should stoj) 
him, and that, however often he tumbled, he would always 
be among the first. And first, or among the first, he always 
was, alike in the tempestuous morning of his life and in the 
splendid calm of the brief and premature evening which 
closed his day of unremitting ill -fortune and almost unre- 
quited labor. 



But health answers its own ends, and has to spare; runs over and inun- 
dates the neiofhborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities." 



138 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V- 



CHAPTER Y. 

1768-1769. 

Fox's Maiden Siieecli. — Wilkes. — His Early Life. — The North Briton 
and the " Essay on Woman." — Persecution of Wilkes. — His Exile. — 
Churchill. — Return of Wilkes, and Jiis Election for Middlesex. — Dis- 
turbances in London. — Fatal Aflfray between the Troojjs and the Peo- 
ple. — Determination of the Court to crush Wilkes. — Conflict between 
the House of Commons and the Middlesex Electors. — Enthusiasm in 
the City on Behalf of Wilkes. — Dingley. — Riot at Brentford. — Weak- 
ness of the Civil Arm. — Colonel Luttrell.^His Cause espoused by the 
Foxes. — Great Debates in Parliament. — Rhetorical Successes of Charles 
Fox. — The King and Wilkes. — Burke on the IMiddlesex Election. — 
Proceedings during the Recess. — Recovery of Lord Chatham. — His 
Reconciliation with the Grenvilles and the Whigs. 

When Fox first spoke, and on wliat subject, is, and will 
ever remain, a doubtful matter. Ills eldest brother, Stephen, 
had entered Parliament at the same time as himself, and was 
quite as eager to be conspicuous, nntil experience taught him 
that public life is an element in which one of a family may 
flounder while another swims.' Yarious paragraphs of five 

' The verdict of a clever young man before he is of an age to be cyni- 
cal or jealous may safely be taken about those of his coevals with whom 
he lives on terms of intimacy ; and two sentences from a letter of Lord 
Carlisle's are perhaps as much notice as tlie second Lord Holland can 
claim from a posterity which has so much else to read about. The letter 
refers to a fire which had destroyed Winterslow House, near Salisbury, 
where Stephen Fox lived after his marriage. " There is something," 
wrote Lord Carlisle, "so laughable in Stejohen's character and conduct 
that, though he were broke upon the wheel, or torn between four wild 
horses, like Damien, tlie persons who live the most with him w^ould never 
be grave or serious upon any calamity happening to him. If Lady IVIary 
was much alarmed, or if the birds were really burned to death, I should 
be very sorry. As this is the first misfortune that ever happened to 
Stephen which he did not bring upon himself, all compassionate thoughts 
and intentions may be turned from Charles to him." Charles was just 



17G8-C0.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 139 

or six lines, intercalated between the more generously report- 
ed speeches of established orators, are by some authorities 
ascribed to Charles, and by some to Stephen ; but the inquiry 
may be left to those M'ho hold that biography should consist 
in long-flowing and discursive attempts at the solution of a 
series of third-rate problems. It is probable that Charles first 
opened his lips in a short discussion which arose on the ques- 
tion whether Sir Wilfrid Lawson, late'IIigh Sheriff of Cumber- 
land, should be examined with regard to an election petition 
presented by Humphrey Senhouse, resident in that county ; 
and if such is the fact, he did wisely in learning the sound of 
his own voice on an occasion when nothing was expected from 
him except plain sense plainly put. AVhatever may have been 
the topic of his maiden address, his air and manner so caught 
the fancy of an artist who happened to be among the audience 
that in the dearth of any more suitable material (for, to guar- 
antee the secrecy of debate, paper in every shape or form was 
rigorously excluded from the gallery of the House of Com- 
mons), he tore off part of his sliirt, and furtively sketched a 
likeness of the young declaimer on which, in after-days, those 
who were fondest of him set not a little store. 

No sooner did he feel himself firm in the saddle than, all 
on fire to win his spurs, he plunged straight into the heart of 
the most obstinate and protracted affray that has raged within 
the barriers of St. Stephen's. Parliament was then in one of 
the acute stages of a controversy trivial in its origin, but 
most memorable in its consequences; for so strong were the 
passions which it aroused, and so vital the principles which 
it called in question, that during its progress our two great 
political parties were moulded into the shape and consistence 
which they have ever since retained. At the time when 
Wilkes was unknown to an}' but his creditors, men took sides 
in the House of Commons, and at elections, on grounds that 
M-ere almost wholly personal ; the good attached themselves 
to a high-minded leader, and the dishonest to an unscrupulous 

then at the very bottom of an aiiparcntly inextricable pecuniary quag- 
mire. 



140 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CnAr. V. 

one ; wliile the names of Whig and Tory had altogether lost 
their deeper meaning, and had ceased to be valued even as 
convenient badges. But long before the harassed tribune, 
after adventures which in duration of time and variety of in- 
cident can be paralleled only by the wanderings of Ulysses, 
was finally admitted to the undisputed honors of the Senate, 
the old party titles had once more come to signify quite as 
much as in the days of Somers and Harley. In the dark and 
evil times that closed the century, the sufferer by arbitrary 
power knew very well in which ranks he must look for those 
wdio were always ready to vindicate the liberty of speech, pen, 
and person. There is nothing exaggerated in Mr. Gladstone's 
declaration that the name of Wilkes, whether we choose it or 
not, must be enrolled among the great champions of English 
freedom. 

That name, which was seldom out of the mouth of our 
great-grandfathers for three weeks together, had been stained 
and blotted from the first. The son of a prosperous distiller, 
who spent money as fast as he made it in the effort to live 
above his station,' John AVilkes, before he came of age, was 
persuaded by his father into a marriage which he describes 
as a sacrifice to Plutus rather than to Yenus, His wife, a 
rigid Methodist, half again as old as himself, he treated shame- 
fully. Like other famous men who have been bad husbands, 
he has found apologists, some of whom had recourse to the 
astounding theory that his domestic disagreements arose 
from a conscientious difference in religious views — the lady 
being a Dissenter, wliile the gentleman, though he not unfre- 
quently honored her chapel by his attendance, made a point 
of never communicating except with the Church of England. 
His more prudent defenders fell back upon the old cant which 
has stood greater writers than Wilkes in stead, that the wife 

* Old Mr. Israel Wilkes kejit a sumptuous table, and a coach and six 
in which (to the detriment of the proverb that a Dissenter's second liorse 
takes liim to the parish church) he was frequently drawn to meeting, al- 
tliough he began life a Churchman. The explanation of the anomaly is 
that he had taken to wife the daughter of a rich Nonconformist, who 
brought him Hoxton Square as part of her dowry. 



1768-G9.] CPIARLES JAMES FOX. lil 

was out of sympathy with the husband, and could not rise to 
the level of his higher aspirations' — a charge which, wdien 
brought to the proof, comes to very little more than this, that 
Mrs. AVilkes did not care to see her home made notorious as 
the centre of everything which was most disreputable in Lon- 
don society. The revels of Medmenham Abbey were re- 
hearsed almost nightly beneath her roof in Great George 
Street ; and the poor lady, after a vain attempt to make her 
presence respected, was driven from her own table in order to 
avoid hearing her husband bandy ribaldry and blasphemy 
with Lord Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood. Wilkes 
speedily ran through her ready money and his own, and ren- 
dered her existence so intolerable that she consented to aban- 
don to him everything that she possessed, including her pater- 
nal estate at Aylesbury, on condition that he should covenant 
to let her live in peace with her mother on a separate income 
of two hundred pounds a year, Wilkes cut a dash for a while 
on the strength of his position as a country gentleman. He 
had already offered himself unsuccessfully as a candidate at 
Berwick with professions which anticipated the relations of 
Burke to his Bristol constituents f and in 1757, at a cost of 
seven thousand pounds, he bought himself in as member for 
Aylesbury during the fag-end of George the Second's last Par- 
liament. He became lieutenant-colonel in the Bucks Militia ; 
the jovial brotherhood of St. Francis noticed with pleasure 
that his dinners no longer bore the marks of a somewhat too 
notable housewife's frugality ; and his cellar would have been 
the best in the county if the proximity of his borough had 

* Carlyle, in his essay ou Diderot, nobly rebukes those regenerators of 
mankind "who, "wliile they would banish tyranny from the globe, them- 
selves have inflicted the most cruel of all conceivable injuries upon the 
rights and feelings of an individual. " A hard saying is this, yet a true 
one: Scoundrelism signifies injustice, and should be left to scoundrels." 

=" " I come here," said Wilkes, " uncorrupting, and I promise you that I 
shall ever be uncorrupted. As I will never take a bribe, so I will never 
oflier one." But the Berwick freemen rejected this preacher of purity, al- 
though he had purchased nearly a couple of lumdred of their number at 
forty pounds a head. 



142 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

not forbidden bis vintages to mature. But tlie enormous 
expense of representing a town near wbicb be resided sent 
Wilkes to tbe Jews, and be speedily bad squandered every 
penny wbicb could be raised on tbe acres wbence bis social 
consideration was derived. Tlien, in bis despair, be turned 
once more upon tbe wife wbom be bad robbed, and, after a 
vain endeavor to coax from ber permission to mortgage ber 
annuity, sued out a writ of babeas corpus in order to terrify 
lier, by tbe tbreat of exerting his conjugal rigbts, into a sur- 
render of tbe pittance wdiicb was all that bis rapacity bad left 
ber. But tbe Court of King's Bencb, baving beard tbe story, 
extended its protection to tbe outraged woman, and bade 
Wilkes molest ber at bis peril in a decree wbose legal pbra- 
seology only sligbtly veils tbe indignation wbicb bad been 
aroused in Lord Mansfield by tbe beartlessness and ingrati- 
tude of tbe busband. 

Sucb was tbe man wbom tbe resentment of tbe king and 
tbe extravagant injustice and violence of bis ministers turned 
into a martyr and an idol. Indeed, if Wilkes bad been less of 
a profligate, be migbt bave missed sometbing of bis popular- 
ity ;' for bis ill-repute as a rake and a scoffer tempted bis op- 
pressors to employ against bim weapons tbe use of wbicb re- 
volted tbe instinct of fair play, wbicb is one of tbe few na- 
tional qualities tbat Englishmen possess in as large measure as 
tbey take credit for it. Wben tbe court, intent upon crushing 



^ Burke has put into the best of prose the sentiments with which nine 
tenths of the decent and religious people of the country heard that 
Wilkes was to be pursued to his destruction because he had written a 
loose poem and an irreverent parody for the amusement of himself and 
of those whom he credulously imagined to be liis friends. " I will not 
believe what no other man living believes, tliat Mr. Wilkes was punished 
for the indecency of his publications or the impiety of his ransacked 
closet. If he had fellen in a common slaughter of libellers and blas- 
phemers, I could well believe that nothing more was meant than was pre- 
tended. But when I see that for years together, full as impious and per- 
haps more dangerous writings to religion and virtue and order have not 
been punished, nor tlieir authors discountenanced, I must consider this as 
a shocking and shameless pretence. I must conclude that Mr. Wilkes is 
the object of persecution not on account of what he has done in common 



17CS-G9.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 1-1:3 

its victim, had been battted in a method of attack which, if 
arbitrary and informal, was at least bold and straightforward, 
it thoughtlessly seized on what appeared to be a golden op- 
portunity of wreaking its own grudges under the pretext of 
avenging insulted piety and morality. But the good sense of 
the British people, shocked by the hypocrisy of a prosecution 
conducted in the interests of virtue in which Sandwich played 
the conscientious informer and March the austere judge, kept 
steadil}-- in view the distinction between public actions and 
private vices. With the exception of the " Essay on Woman," 
which was never meant to be published, Wilkes had written 
nothing that was not sound in reason and respectful in tone. 
IS^umber forty-five of the North Briton^ if it had appeared in 
the Moriihig Chronicle as a leading article at the time when 
George the Third dismissed Pitt and sent for Addington, or 
at the time when William the Fourth dismissed the Whigs 
and sent for Peel, would have been regarded as a very passa- 
ble effusion, rather old-fashioned in the tenderness with which 
it treated the susceptibilities of the monarch.' Grave states- 
men acknowledged that Wilkes in his famous paper had ren- 
dered a solid and permanent service to the cause of constitu- 
tional government by the clear and attractive form in which 
he had laid down the doctrine that ministers are responsible 
for the contents of the royal speech. Every one who had read 
enough history to know the danger of a bad precedent in the 
hands of a masterful ruler was filled Vvith alarm when the 

with others who are the objects of reward, but of that in which lie diifers 
from many of them : that he is pursued for the spirited dispositions 
which are blended with his vices; for his unconquerable lirmuess; for 
his resolute, indefatigable, strenuous resistance against oppression." 

* " The personal character of our present sovereign makes us easy and 
happy that so great a power is lodged in such hands; but the Favorite 
has given too just cause for the general odium. The prerogative of the 
crown is to exert the constitutional powers intrusted to it in a way not 
of blind favor or partiality, but of wisdom and judgment. This is the 
spirit of our constitution. The people, too, have their prerogative ; and 
I hope the fine words of Dryden will be engraven on our hearts — Free- 
dom is the English subject's prerogative." Such was the criticism to 
stifle and to punish which George the Third set his kingdom in a flame. 



144: THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

house of a politician obnoxious to authority was rifled, and his 
person seized, under a process of flagrant illegality, and when 
the independence of the legislature was undermined by the 
shameless coercion and corruption which were put in practice 
in order to wring a justiflcation of that illegality from an un- 
willing Parliament. The common folk, who could not appre- 
ciate the perils which lurked beneath a general Avarrant, did 
not like to see a man ruined for writing what nine people out 
of ten were thinking. They could understand how terrible 
were the odds against a private person engaged in a combat 
d outrance with a powerful ministry which, after stooping to 
pilfer manuscripts and suborn printer's devils, did not scruple 
to employ in litigation the inexhaustible resources of the 
Treasury for the purpose of protecting itself and its instru- 
ments from the penalties of its tyrannical deeds and its das- 
tardly manoeuvres. They could admire the dignified silence 
that Wilkes opposed to the clamorous and oflacious treachery 
of his former boon companions ; the cheerful and polite in- 
trepidity with which he stood before the pistol of one court 
bravo or House of Commons bully after another; and the 
easy, if somewhat impudent, pleasantry of the demeanor 
which, however low his heart might sink within him, he con- 
tinued to maintain amidst the wreck of his crumbling fort- 
unes.' 

' The spirit and humor displayed in his correspondence witli the secre- 
taries of state, and the insolent stupidity of their joint answer, almost 
command our sympathy for the contemptuous satisfaction with which, 
three months afterwards, Wilkes heard that Lord Egremout, the heavier 
and more respectable of the pair, "had paid the debt to nature and been 
gathered to the dull of ancient days." One of the two noblemen who, in 
the case of the "Essay on Woman," had been literary accomplices before 
the act, turned king's evidence against the author, and the other was grat- 
ified with the lord-lieutenancy of which Earl Temple had been deprived 
as a punishment for refusing to abandon an old friend in his trouble. 
The voluble fervor with whicli a lord of the Admiralty who had been 
intimate with Wilkes in March publicly disowned him in April was too 
much even for the obsequious majority of the House of Commons, and 
involved the time-server in an altercation which very nearly ended in a 
hostile meeting. 



17G8-G9.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 145 

Until the wrong's of Lord Bute and his pnpil had been re- 
venged, Wilkes's life was never worth a week's purchase. Dr. 
Johnson spoke language more moderate than that which was 
current in the highest circles when he declared that if he 
were king he would send half a dozen footmen and have the 
abusive scoundrel well ducked. It would have been easy to 
select the half-dozen, for there were volunteers in plent3\ The 
lord steward of the household was the first to force Wilkes into 
a quarrel, so conducted that the very seconds of the aggressor 
confessed that all which was brutal and foolish in the duel 
was on the side of the peer, while the chivalry of the institu- 
tion was admirably sustained by the commoner. When the 
poor fellow crossed the Channel to enjoy a short respite in 
the company of his daughter, a schoolgirl whom he loved with 
a delicacy and devotion that did much to redeem his charac- 
ter, he found himself dogged about Paris by a bloodthirsty 
Scotch captain ; and after his return to England he was chal- 
lenged by a Scotch colonial governor who, after the manner 
of his class, was playing truant from his province of West 
Florida. At length a member of Parliament, a hanger-on of 
Bute and treasurer to the princess dowager, after diligently 
practising at a mark on week-days and Sundays alike, dared 
him to a solitary and unwitnessed encounter, ignored his un- 
doubted right to the choice of weapons, and kept on firing till 
Wilkes was shot through the body. As he lay on the turf of 
Hyde Park, his first concern was for the safety of his oppo- 
nent, who had so managed the affair that if death had been 
the consequence, the eloquence and skill of all the ministerial 
lawyers together could not have persuaded a London jury to 
bring in any verdict short of wilful murder. 

Neither his gallantry nor his misfortunes availed in the 
least to soften the industrious rancor of his enemies. He was 
turned out of the militia. He was expelled from his seat in 
the Commons. His Avritings were ordered to be burned by the 
common hangman — a ceremony which very nearly terminated 
in the hangman and the sheriffs being burned by the specta- 
tors. In an address fulsome enough to have proceeded from 
the Parliament of the Kestoration, the two Houses joined in 

10 



146 THE EARLY HISTOllY OF [Chap. V. 

praying his Majesty to indict the author of the JV^ort/i £r li- 
on. The Peers, as if not one of them had Boccaccio on an 
accessible shelf in his library, were not ashamed to call for a 
prosecution on account of the "Essay on AVoman." Wilkes, 
as soon as he could be moved, had been carried to Paris, partly 
that he might be nursed by his daughter, and partly to avoid 
the irritating attentions of the king's surgeons, whom the 
House of Commons sent almost daily to his bedside in order 
to watch for the moment wdien he would be sufficiently ad- 
vanced in his convalescence to be persecuted afresh. His suf- 
ferings on the journey were such as it required all his forti- 
tude to support ; ' and when once across the Channel, he 
thought it better to remain in exile than to run the gantlet 
of two successive criminal informations, with all the estates of 
the realm for his prosecutors. The public, to use his own 
words, had no longer any call upon him. The illegality of 
imprisoning a man's person and seizing his private papers 
under color of a nameless warrant, which left it for the discre- 
tion of the tipstaff to select his prey, had been established by 
Pratt, then presiding in the Common Pleas, in a series of 
courageous and enlightened judgments; and for Wilkes to 
stand his trial under the old law of libel as interpreted by 
Lord Mansfield, would have been to sacrifice his liberty and, 
feeble as he then was, his life, without any prospect of gaining 
a point in the interest of constitutional freedom. As long as 
the jury were only summoned to decide on the authorship of 
a paper, while the judge claimed to jDronounce whether it was 
an innocent criticism or a seditious libel, the Court of King's 
Bench was nothing better than a shambles where the attornej^- 
general pinioned the victim and the chief-justice knocked him 
down. Wilkes, in a letter from France of January, 1764, de- 
fined the view which he took of his obligations as a citizen in 
language which does him honor, " The two important deci- 
sions," he wrote, "in the Court of Common Pleas and the 

' " My wound," lie wrote from Dover, " has been a good deal fretted by 
the vile jolts through the rascally towns of Stroud, Rochester, and Chat- 
ham ; but to-day I recover my spirits. I think Friday and yesterday were 
the most unhappy days I have known." 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 14:7 

Guildhall have secured forever an Englishman's liberty and 
property. They have grown out of my iirmness and the affair 
of the North Briton ; but neither are we nor our posterity 
concerned whether John Wilkes or John a ISTokes wrote or 
published the North Briton or the 'Essay on Woman.' " 

He was found guilty, and on his not appearing to receive 
sentence, he was outlawed for contumacy. lie resided four 
years on the Continent, much courted by Frenchmen, wdiose 
experience of lettres de cachet prompted them to make com- 
mon cause with the agreeable martyr of general warrants. 
The English colony at Paris and in the Italian- cities where 
he sojourned received him with a courteous curiosity which 
the first evening passed under the same ceiling with him sel- 
dom failed to convert into an admiring intimacy. The secre- 
taries of state had carefully instructed their agents in foreign 
parts to frown upon him ; and his natural tendency towards 
hot water was kept in check by the knowledge that if he got 
himself into a scrape it was as much as any envoy's or consul's 
place w\as worth to stir a finger to protect him. Before, how- 
ever, he left the capitals to which they w'ere accredited, our 
diplomatists generally contrived to procure themselves the 
treat of his society ; and Wilkes was not the man to break his 
heart because he w^as excluded from the doubtful joys of ofli- 
cial hospitalities. As long as David Hume, over Baron d'Hol- 
bach's burgundy, was willing to forget that he was secretary 
of the British embassy, Wilkes was only too glad that his rep- 
utation saved him from a banquet at the ambassador's hotel, 
where " two hours of mighty grave conversation " were pur- 
chased by six more of faro. 

Wilkes had a real love of letters, and had he been less am- 
bitious he might have left something that people still would 
care to read ; but he was not exempt from the hallucination 
which seduces public men to attempt the historian during 
their fragments of leisure, with about as reasonable a chance 
of success as would attend a land-surveyor wdio turned land- 
scape-painter in the interv^als of his business. A more hope- 
ful task than a constitutional history of England in two quar- 
to volumes, to be commenced and ended within two years at 



148 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V- 

a distance of a thousand miles from the State-paper Office and 
the British Museum, was imposed upon him bj friendship, 
and accepted witli an alacrity which proved that he overrated 
his own industry and patience. Churchill, among whose in- 
numerable faults ingratitude had no place, had started from 
England in the late autumn of 176-i to visit his banished pa- 
tron. He got no farther than Boulogne, where he died of a 
fever in the arms of Wilkes, whom he named his literary ex- 
ecutor, and who readily undertook the charge of editing the 
collective works of one who had never written more forcibly 
than Avhen he was avenging the author of the North Brit- 
on, and more sincerely than when he was praising him.' 
Wilkes inscribed his sorrow, " in the close style of the an- 
cients," npon a sepulchral urn of alabaster, the appropriate 
gift of Winckelmann, and retired to a villa overlooking Naples 
with the intention of not leaving it until he had erected a 
more durable monument to Churchill in the shape of a vol- 
ume of annotations which he fondly expected posterity to 
cherish as if they had been so many scholia on Horace from 
the hands of Maecenas or Agrippa. But when the first grief 
had passed away, he began to be aware of the unusual diffi- 
culties which beset his literary project. The letters in which 
he applied to correspondents at home for information that 
could throw light upon the personal allusions in the " Duel- 
list" and the "Candidate," where Sandwich M'as used worse 
than Wharton had been used in the " Epistle to Lord Cob- 
ham,"^ were not likely to pass unscathed through a Post-office 

' " Friends I have made whom envy must commend, 

But not one foe whom I would wish a friend. 
What if a thousand Butes and Hollands bawl? 
One Wilkes hath made a large amends for all." 
^ The most pointed lines in the "Duellist" are, indeed, those which 
compare Sandwich to Wharton, and w'ould fain suggest a rivalry between 
Churchill and Pope. 

" Nature designed him in a rage 
To be the Wharton of his age ; 
But, having given all the sin, 
Forgot to put the virtues in." 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 149 

over which that not too scrnpulous statesman ruled supreme. 
There was not a man in Europe, so Wilkes feelingly com- 
plained, who wrote to a friend under the same disadvantages 
as himself. His more bulky manuscripts and his return proofs 
had little chance of escaping the searchers of the English Cus- 
tom-house ; and though Yoltaire pressed him to accept the ser- 
vices of his own printers, he prudently forbore to enter on busi- 
ness relations with the patriarch. As the work took shape, his 
unerring perception of the absurd and the indecorous could not 
allow Wilkes to remain blind to the awkwardness of appear- 
ing before the critics of Tory magazines as the commentator 
on poems of wdiich he himself was the hero. And as months, 
and still more as years, went on, it became evident even to the 
l^artial eye of friendship that the writer whom Cowper, and 
thousands besides Cowper, once esteemed the poet of the cen- 
tury had earned but an ephemeral reputation. Churchill was 
inspired by both the motives which, according to the two 
great Latin satirists, are the parents of satire ; but his indig- 
nation did not burn with the pure flame of Juvenal, and his 
impecuniosity, unlike the honorable poverty of Horace, was 
the child of his vices. Writing to live, he did not write so 
that his works should live after him. Dashing off a poem a 
month, in order to catch a perennial stream of half-crowns 
from his eager and insatiable readers, he vehemently declared 
that to blot, prune, or correct was like the cutting-away of 
his own flesh. 

"Little of books, and little known of men, 
"When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen ; 
Rough as they rmi, the ready thoughts set down ; 
Rough as they run, discharge them on the town." 

With his quiver of darts so unpolished that they could not 
escape the rust, tipped with venom that long ago had lost its 
sting, Churchill, "the scourge of bad men, and hardly better 
than the very worst," easily and rapidly stormed in his life- 
time the citadel of Fame, but he was not of those whose names 
are engraved upon its bulwarks. Wilkes had reckoned upon 
his friend's poetry as a vehicle for conveying the story of his 



150 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

own wrongs to future ages. He confidently prophesied that, 
with the powerful aid of Churchill, he would give signal proof 
of the depth of his " detestation for their common enemies." 
But he soon discovered his mistake. After working for a 
while with little heart, he ceased to work at all ; and the very 
meagre result of his labors which has found its way into print 
is in no sense such as to make us wish for more. 

It was not long before he hit upon a method of showing his 
enemies that he was alive very much more efficacious than the 
republication of satires which were already moribund. While, 
down at Midhurst, Lord Montagu's grooms and gardeners, in 
their temporary capacity of landed proprietors, were choosing 
Fox to represent them in Parliament, less tranquil scenes were 
being enacted in the more immediate neighborhood of Lon- 
don. Wilkes, who pined for home, had paid a secret visit to 
England as early as 1766, and had addressed to the Duke of 
Grafton a pathetic but far from undignified prayer for leave 
to remain, tranquil and obscure, in his native land. His let- 
ter produced him nothing except a verbal answer framed to 
be evasive; and he retired once more, to use his own play- 
ful words, from stern and inexorable Rome " to the gay, the 
polite Athenians." But he got little comfort out of his his- 
torical parallels ; and, after digesting his misery and anger for 
another weary twelvemonth, he appealed from the governors 
to the governed in a pamphlet which, even when expurgated 
by the caution of the booksellers, made public facts which it 
would have been cheap for the king to have surrendered a 
half-year of the civil list to suppress. A story of grievous 
outrage, plainly and pointedly told as only a cultivated man 
of the world could tell it, reminded some and informed oth- 
ers that there were persons in high places who did not lack 
the will to revive the despotic cruelties of the Star-chamber. 
Widely and greedily read, the narrative which Wilkes had 
given to the press enlisted in his behalf the ardor and indig- 
nation of his fellow-countrymen ; and an opportunity was close 
at hand for turning those sentiments to account. A general 
election was coming in the midst of profound and all but 
universal discontent, while the discontented in vain looked 



1768-69.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 151 

around for a question in support of wliicli tliey could rallj^, 
and for a public man who dared to lead whither they cared to 
follow. Wilkism, as has been well remarked, was a half-un- 
conscious protest on the part of the nation against the corrup- 
tion and oppression of its oligarchical rulers, and the misery 
and despair which their iniquitous laws entailed.' The state 
of the popular mind, and the political circumstances of the 
period, were much the same as when, at the beginning of the 
next reign, the national disaffection and dissatisfaction found 
vent in that outburst of hatred which went near to overwhelm 
the enemies of Queen Caroline; but in 176S the people had 
far more to say for their choice of a favorite than in 1820. 
The instinct which carried them to the side of Wilkes, as 
Burke truly said, was justified by reason. Here, at all events, 
was one wdio had endured much in their cause ; who, if he 
had only been thinking of what was safest for himself, might 
have made his peace long ago at the expense of the common 
liberties of all citizens ; and who now was returning, poor and 
alone, to try conclusions with a government which had already 
expended ninety thousand guineas of English money on the 
chivalrous enterprise of overthrowing the champion of Eng- 
lish rights. 

Wilkes soon followed his manifesto, and showed himself 
publicly about London in February, 1768. His first proceed- 
ing was to send his footman to Buckingham House with a 
letter entreating his Majesty to let by-gones be by-gones, and 
his next to present himself as a candidate for the city. His 
appearance on the hustings in the Guildhall aroused an excite- 
ment that showed itself, after old English fashion, in betting 
so extensive and systematic that the wagers on his success 
were consolidated by a ring of enterprising brokers into a rec- 
ognized stock, which was freely quoted on 'Change. Wilkes, 
however, had been too late in a field that was already occupied 
by four trusted and influential aldermen ; and he had attained 
as yet only to the first stage of a popularity which, before six 



' This observation is made by Mr. John Morley in his " Historical Study 
of Edmund Burke" — a dissertation worthy of its subject. 



152 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

months had gone, would have enabled hhn to carry any open 
constituency in the country at a moment's notice. He was 
defeated in the city ; but his defeat served as an advertise- 
ment; and nothing could exceed the enthusiasm created by 
his speech to the livery on the last day of the contest, when 
he announced that, since they would not have him as freemen 
of London, he should at once ask for their confidence as free- 
holders of Middlesex. 

Brentford was the polling-place for the shire ; and the in- 
cumbent of Brentford chanced at that time to be Mr. John 
Home, a young clergyman who had formed himself on Wilkes, 
and had endeavored to commend himself to his model by pro- 
fessions of impiety too strong even for the taste of one who 
had discussed religion in the cloister of Medmenham.' De- 
termined to carry by storm, since he could not conciliate, the 
favor of his hero, and inspired by an uncontrollable hatred of 
injustice, which in the course of his wayward life led him into 
much trouble and entitled him to some public gratitude, 
Home plunged over head and ears into the turmoil of the 
election ; pledged all that he was worth in the world to set 
the best taps in Brentford running in the cause of liberty ; 
and rode and walked up and down the county with the praises 
and sorrows of Wilkes upon his very persuasive lips. The 
ministerial candidates, who very soon discovered that the tide 
was against them, were in hopes that the violence of the mob 
would give the House of Commons an excuse to unseat their 
opponent ; but they had to do with two as consummate tac- 
ticians as ever mounted a hustings or thumbed a poll-book. 
Home kept his parishioners well in hand, and Brentford itself 

' A clever letter from Horoe, dated the third of January, 1766, full of sin- 
cere but very obtrusive adulation which Wilkes never really forgave, af- 
fords a striking instance of the eifect produced upon a man of sense "when 
he sees his own least-becoming features enlarged and reflected in the mir- 
ror of flattery. The indecent levity of the passage which commences, but 
unfortunately does not end, with the words " You are now entering into 
a correspondence witli a j^arson, and I am greatly apprehensive lest that 
title should disgust," pleased Wilkes as little as Johnson was pleased by 
Boswell's apology for being born a Scotchman. 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 153 

was as qniet as if the inhabitants had been choosing an over- 
seer of the poor ; bnt on tlie morning of the election all the 
strategical points in the neighborhood were occupied in force 
bj the popular party. Before daylight six thousand weavers 
from Spitallields had taken possession of Piccadilly and the 
Oxford road, and allowed no man to travel into the country 
without a paper in his hat inscribed "Number 45, AVilkes 
and Liberty !" The coaches of Sir William Proctor and Mr. 
Cooke, who ten days before had as fair a chance of being 
made knights of the shire by acclamation as any pair of can- 
didates in the kingdom, never got farther west than Hyde 
Park Corner, and did not return to town on their own wheels ; 
and it was with difficulty that the occupants of the ill-fated 
vehicles contrived to smuggle themselves into Brentford, only 
to find that Wilkes was polling five votes for every three of 
theirs. 

A single day decided the election ; and when night fell, 
London had its first experience of scenes with which it soon 
learned to be familiar. In the absence of the constables, who 
were all at Brentford, waiting for a riot which never cams/^ 
the crowd insisted on a general illumination, and enforced its 
decree by the customary process.' Even prompt obedience 
did not save Lord Bute's windows; and others of the Scotch 
nobility who could not endure the notion of wasting candle- 
light on Wilkes had not a pane of glass left along the street- 
front of their houses. The younger of the two most famous 
beauties that Mayfair has ever seen — the lady who was Duch- 
ess-dowager of Hamilton and Duchess-presumptive of Argyll, 
and whom two such marriages had made more of a Scotch- 
woman than if she had been born in the Canongate — stood a 
siege of three hours rather than have to tell her husband, on 
liis return from Loch Fyne, that she had burned even half a 
pint of oil to the raaligner of his nation. The Austrian am- 
bassador, the most precise and solemn of German counts, was 
pulled out of his carriage by a troop of jDatriots, who probably 

' The glaziers, so Foote tells us, swore that a single niglit of the Mid- 
dlesex election was worth to them all our Indian victories put together. 



154 THE EAULY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

mistook him for a recent importation from North Britain, and 
who deliberately proceeded to chalk " 45 " on the sole of his 
shoe. The English peers were treated with more good-humor 
than the Scotch, but with quite as little ceremony. Those 
who were caught on their way from a rout were ordered to 
huzza for Wilkes and liberty, and then were graciously per- 
mitted to drive home with glasses broken, and the magic 
number scratched all over the panels of their chariots. One 
great duke found that it was not enough to regale the popu- 
lace with beer, unless he would swallow some of it himself to 
the health of the new member for Middlesex. The lord 
mayor, who was zealous for the court, thought it necessary to 
muster the trainbands; but his drummers were marching 
about at the head of the mob, and platoons of tradesmen 
who ten days back had been cheering Wilkes in the Guild- 
hall could not be trusted to lire on an assemblage which was 
mainly composed of their own apprentices. The foot-guards 
were drawn out, but did not come into collision with the peo- 
ple, who had carried their man, and were not in a temjDcr for 
martyrdom ; and by breakfast-time on the third day the tu- 
mults died out of themselves, leaving the recollection as yet 
of no irritating severity on the one side, and of nothing more 
dangerous than horse-play on the other. 

The disturbances hitherto had been of the nature of an elec- 
tion riot — on a greater scale than other election riots, as Lon- 
don was larger than other cities ; but worse remained to come. 
Though once more a member of Parliament, Wilkes was none 
the less an outlaw ; and, to the disgrace of our system, the 
tribunal which had outlawed him, now that it had him in its 
power, could not make up its mind what to do with him. 
Among a population so contentious in its instincts that it will 
always take sides on every question, from a European war to 
a trumped-up claim for an estate, the number of those who 
espouse the cause of a litigant or a prisoner is determined, not 
so much by the strength of his case as by the length of time 
during which it has been before the public ; but, forgetting 
this marked trait in the character of their fellow-countrymen, 
Lord Mansfield and his colleagues wasted two live-long months, 



1768-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 155 

of wliich every day gave Wilkes thousands of partisans, and 
every week brought with it an outbreak more formidable 
than the last. He surrendered himself on the twentieth of 
April ; but though he had given the Solicitor of the Treasury 
long notice of his intention, the judges of the King's Bencli 
took till tlie twenty-seventh before they would even decide 
to refuse him bail ; and meanwhile the feeling in his favor 
had risen to such a point that nothing but his own personal 
influence, strenuously exerted, secured a quiet court in which 
to commit him. After having been drawn in triumph from 
Westminster to Bishopsgate, he stole away from his admirers 
in disguise, and got into jail M'ith almost as much trouble as 
Grotius or Lord Nithisdale got out of it. The jjrison was 
blockaded all day and every day by a throng which patiently 
waited for the chance of his showing himself at the window. 
On the morning of the meeting of Parliament the crowd, 
which had assembled in larger numbers than usual in the ex- 
pectation that Wilkes would be allowed to take his seat, found 
itself confronted by a detachment of the Guards, who had been 
marched down to keep order, and whom the Opposition writ- 
ers accused of having wilfully disturbed it. After some mut- 
ual provocation the troops fired, and five or six lives were 
lost; and most unfortunate it was that the first blood shed 
in a quarrel which the nation persisted in regarding as Lord 
Bute's was laid to the account of some Scotch soldiers, acting 
under the orders of a Scotch ensio-n. At lencrth, on the eio-hth 
of June, Lord Mansfield reversed the outlawry, in a judgment 
the stately eloquence of which only partially concealed a 
framework of paltry technicalities ; and, after another inter- 
val of ten days, Wilkes was brought up to receive sentence 
on the original charges, and condemned to pay a thousand 
pounds and be imprisoned for twenty-two calendar months, 
because, five years before, he had written two pieces, of which 
one did him nothing but credit, and the other lie had never 
published. 

And now George the Third had his opportunity. The mo- 
ment had arrived for repairing, and even for turning to profit, 
the mistake which, wlien he was too young to know better, he 



156 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

had committed at the instigation of the worst ministers that 
ever advised him. A single flourish of the royal pen at the 
bottom of a pardon would have endowed him with a popu- 
larity such as no monarch since William the Third had de- 
served, and none since Charles the Second had enjoyed. By 
promptly and chivalrously remitting a sentence which shocked 
everybody except Treasury pensioners and legal pedants, he 
would at once attract to himself that national confidence and 
affection which had long gone a-begging for an object, and 
would relegate Wilkes to an obscurity whence, but for the in- 
fatuation of his enemies, he could never have emerged. The 
member for Middlesex would have been powerless in a House 
of Commons which cared even less than it cares now for rep- 
utations acquired outside its own walls, and least of all for 
such a reputation as his. He had not the gift of speaking 
well, and his taste and judgment were too sound for him to 
find pleasure in speaking indifferently. He would soon have 
fallen back into his natural station — " a silent senator, and 
hardly supporting the eloquence of a weekly newspaper."' 
There were those about the court who were persuaded that it 
was wiser to leave Wilkes alone ; but already it was no light 
matter to counsel George the Third against his wishes. It 
was the misfortune of his life (so Junius told him, meaning, 
by the phrase that it was the fault of his disposition) that he 



' Junius is always excellent on the North Briton and the 3Iiddlesex 
election. Nothing can be more just than the passage in which he ex- 
plains to the king how his Majesty had been the making of Wilkes. 
"There is hardly a period at which the most irregular character may not 
be redeemed. The mistakes of one sex find a retreat in patriotism ; those 
of another in devotion. . . . The rays of the royal indignation, collected 
upon him, served only to illuminate, and could not consume. Animated 
by the fiivor of the people on one side, and heated by persecution on the 
other, his views and sentiments changed with his situation. Hardly seri- 
ous at first, he is now an enthusiast. Is this a contention worthy of a 
king ?" " You have degraded," he says elsewhere to tlie Duke of Graf- 
ton, "the royal dignity into a base and dishonorable competition with 
Mr. Wilkes." "If George the Third," wn-ote Franklin in his journal, 
"had had a bad private character, and John Wilkes a good one, the lat- 
ter might have turned the former out of his kingdom." 



176S-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 157 

never became acquainted with the language of truth until he 
heard it in the complaints of his people. False pride carried 
the day ; and the king would not be satisfied without throw- 
ing down his glove to one who might have been something 
more than an antagonist but for vices which rendered even 
liis antao-onism deo-radins: to the crown. 

The impulse that drove Parliament into a line of conduct 
which was saved from being criminal only by its stupidity 
came direct from the highest quarter. As early as the twen- 
ty-fifth of April the king, entering betimes on his vocation of 
managing the manager of the House of Commons, wrote to 
Lord North a letter, the first sentence of which contained the 
germ whence sprouted that rank overgrowth of scandal and 
sedition which was soon to deface our history. " Though en- 
tirely confiding in your attachment to my person, as well as 
in your hatred of every lawless proceeding, yet I think it 
highly proper to apprise you that the exclusion of Mr. Wilkes 
appears to be very essential, and must be effected ; and that I 
make no doubt, when you lay this affair with your usual pre- 
cision before the meeting of the gentlemen of the House of 
Commons this evening, it will meet with the required una- 
nimity and vigor." What were the lawless proceedings to 
which his Majesty referred he perhaps found it difficult to de- 
fine, for the only contribution which he made towards assist- 
ing Lord North to get up his case was a suggestion that, by 
going back forty years, a precedent might be discovered in the 
expulsion of a member who had been convicted of forgery. 
Armed with his meagre brief, the Chancellor of the Excheq- 
uer presented himself, first to his brother-ministers, and then 
before one of those general councils of the party which, as a 
link in the delicate mechanism of parliamentary government, 
had not yet fallen into unmerited disuse. Both in the cab- 
inet and in the larger conclave the voice of common-sense 
made itself heard. Granb^^, Hawke, and Conway, the three 
men of the most approved valor in the kingdom, confessed 
that they had not the courage to face the consequences of a 
step which would make every second Englishman a rebel at 
lieart, and convert London into a hostile capital. They sue- 



158 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

ceeded so far that it was agreed to jiostpone action till Par- 
liament met in the winter. As. soon as the JSTovember sitting 
commenced, Wilkes himself was the first to take the field. 
His friends presented a petition calling the attention of tlie 
Commons to the harsh and. arbitrary treatment which had 
been inflicted upon one who now belonged to their honorable 
selves, and praj'ing in respectful terms for inquiry and re- 
dress. So artfully was the document drawn, and so ably were 
the strings pulled from within the King's Bench Prison, that, 
by the time the session was a month old, Wilkes had set the 
two Houses by the ears. By a simple and. bold stratagem he 
had persuaded the Commons to request the attendance of Lord 
Sandwich and Lord March, in order to give evidence about 
the intrigue by which the proof-sheets of the " Essay on Wom- 
an" had come into the hands of the authorities; and those 
two noblemen, who knew Wilkes quite well enough to be 
aware that, if he once got them at the bar, he would set a mark 
on them that would outlast their lifetime, in an agony of ap- 
prehension prevailed upon the Lords to reject the application. 
The Commons, always forward to stand upon their rights, 
persisted in their demand ; and the relations between the 
Houses were already at a deadlock when an event occurred 
which encouraged the ministry to assume the offensive, and 
deprived the world of an entertainment which would have 
surpassed anything of the sort tliat had taken place since Cic- 
ero's cross-examination of Clodius. 

A fortnight before the fatal tumult of the previous spring. 
Lord Weymouth, as secretary of state, had written a letter to 
the magistrates urging them freely to employ their power of 
calling out the military. Just at the moment when the dis- 
pute between the Lords and Commons was at its height, this 
letter appeared at full length in the St. James's Chronicle^ 
headed by a few lines of comment, the violence of which 
would have been inexcusable if proceeding from any pen ex- 
cept that of the man for love of M'hom the victims of the ca- 
tastrophe had met their death. Wilkes, when taxed with the 
authorship at the bar of the Commons, told the Speaker that 
there was no need to call witnesses; that he avowed the act; 



17GS-G0.] CHARLES JAMES FOX 159 

that he gloried in it ; and that he had other rods in pickle for 
any secretary of state who should again indite " so bloody a 
scroll." Bravely indeed did he on that occasion earn the line 
compliment which was paid him in the " Vision of Judgment" 
by a poet who was as little of a time-server as himself;' but 
the mob of sinecurists and boroughmongers, who hooted down 
his advocates as a preliminary to passing sentence on his cause, 
had as much chivalry in them as a pack of prairie Avolves 
round a wounded buffalo. Stifling discussion by clamor, and 
overriding all pleas of privilege and difficulties of procedure 
by enormous majorities, they beat back the defenders of jus- 
tice and legality from point to point until they found them- 
selves face to face with the issue towards which their royal 
employer so many months before had ordered them to direct 
their efforts. 

On Friday, the third of February, 1796, Lord Barrington, 
the man through whose mouth the king had thanked the sol- 
diery for shooting half a dozen of his unarmed subjects in 
terms which would not have been too cold if addressed to the 
survivors of the column of Fontenoy, moved to expel Wilkes 
the House, on the ground that in the course of the last 
six years he had published five seditious and impious libels. 
The debate was powerful, but the power lay all on one side. 
The good speakers on the ministerial benches played their 
parts ill, and the bad vilely ; and the impiety of AVilkes was 
far outdone by the place-holders and place-hunters, who in 
every third sentence invoked the most awful of names as a 



" That soul below 
Looks much like George the Third, but to my mind 
A good deal older. Bless me ! is he blind ? " 
" He is what you behold him, and his doom 

Depends upon his deeds," tlie Angel said. 
" If you have aught to aiTaigu in him, the tomb 

Gives license to the humblest beggar's head 
To lift itself against the loftiest." " Some," 

Said Wilkes, " don't wait to see them laid in lead 
For such a liberty ; and I, for one, 
Have told them what I thought beneath the sun." 



IGO I'lIE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

sanction for the incense wliicli they were burning to such 
brazen images as Kigby and Weymouth. " I bad rather," 
cried a learned sergeant, who looked to be a learned judge, 
" appear before this house as an idolater of a minister than a 
ridiculer of my Maker. I never will believe that a man will 
render to Csesar the things that are Caesar's if he does not 
render to God the things that are God's." Dr. Blackstone, 
who knew that the production which he censured as blasphe- 
mous had been revised by two of the ministers with whom he 
was going to vote, was not ashamed to announce that, when 
he saw religion made a jest, he thought it incumbent upon 
him to vindicate his Creator. George Grenville, on the other 
hand, packing into a weighty argument his rare stores of con- 
stitutional learning, and the then unequalled experience of his 
varied and indnstrious career, convinced every hearer who was 
at once disinterested and intelligent that the course on which 
the government had embarked was in direct violation of parlia- 
mentary precedent, natural equity, and national expediency. 
Grenville took special care that his speech (the best, by univer- 
sal consent, that he had ever made) should stand on recoi'd 
word for word as it was delivered ; but it is only from hasty 
and disjointed notes, scribbled on the knee of a weary senator, 
that we can piece together even a fragment of the masterly 
reasoning with which Burke exposed the peril and the iniquity 
of overwhelming a man who had committed no single crime 
worthy of punishment by gathering half a dozen peccadilloes, 
utterly disconnected in time, circumstance, and character, into 
one sweeping and accumulated indictment.' Lord l^ortli an- 



' " Accumulative crimes are things unknown to the courts below. In 
those courts two bad things will not make one capital offence. This is 
a serving up like cooks. Some will eat of one dish, and some of another, 
so that there will not be a fragment left. Some will like the strong solid 
roast beef of the blasj^hemous libel. One honorable member could not 
bear to see Christianity abused, because it was part of the common-law 
of England. This is substantial roast-beef reasoning. One gentleman said 
he meant Mr. Wilkes's petition to be the ground of exj^ulsion ; another, 
the message from the House of Lords. 'I come into this resolution,' 
says a fourth, ' because of his censure of the conduct of a great magistrate.' 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. IGl 

swered an oration, which it would have taken a volume to re- 
fute, with a trite and liippant repartee, such as contents a 
noisy majority in a hurry to be in bed before daylight ; and 
the expulsion of AVilkes was carried by two hundred and nine- 
teen to a hundred and thirty-seven — Lord John Cavendish, 
like a good Whig, telling for the noes. And so the throng of 
members poured homewards along Whitehall at three in the 
morning, the WMser among the victors acknowledging to them- 
selves a suspicion that Burke was not far wrong when he told 
them tliat the lateness of the hour, the candlelight, and, as he 
probably added, the interruptions from the pit, put him in 
mind of a representation of a tragicomedy performed by his 
Majesty's servants, by desire of several jDcrsons of distinction, 
for the benefit of Mr. Wilkes, and at the expense of the Con- 
stitution. 

The piece was fated to be run till both the author and the 
company were heartily tired of it. Triumphant in Parlia- 
ment, the king had forgotten that he still had the country to 
reckon w^itli. "l^othing," he wrote to Lord North, with an 
optimism as royal as his grammar, "could be more honorable 
for government than the conclusion of the debate, and prom- 
ises a very proper end of this irksome affair this day." And 



' In times of danger,' says a fifth, ' I am afraid of doing anything that will 
shake the government.' These charges are all brought together to form 
an accumulated offence which may extend to the expulsion of every other 
member of this House. The law, as it is now laid down, is that any 
member who, at any time, has been guilty of writing a libel, will never 
be free from punishment. Is any man, when he takes up his pen, certain 
that the day may not come when he may wish to be a member of Parlia- 
ment ? This, sir, will put a last hand to the liberty of the press." When 
it came to his turn to justify a precedent under which every prime-min- 
ister of the present century who has written anything more pointed than 
a queen's speech might have been excluded from Parliament, Lord North 
had nothing to say except that Burke, like the shepherd-boy in the fable, 
was always terrifying himself where there was no danger. Lord Temple, 
in a letter to Chatham, fully confirms Burke's descrijjtion of the debate. 
" Every man," he says, " dwelt on the crime he most detested, and disap- 
proved the punisliment for the rest. The various flowers of their elo- 
quence composed a most delightful nosegay." 

11 



162 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

yet signs were abroad which might well have shaken his con- 
fidence. Mr. Cooke, the ministerial member for Middlesex, 
had only survived to enjoy his unpopularity for a few months. 
The freeholders invited Wilkes to select his own colleague. 
He named Sergeant Glynn, his trusty counsel, who, through- 
out the persecution of the press which raged in the first ten 
years of George the Third maintained the independence of 
the bar as gallantly as did Erskine during the judicial Eeign 
of Terror which disgraced the anti-Jacobin reaction ; and the 
recommendation secured the seat for Glynn as certainly as if 
Middlesex had been a Cornish borough of which his client 
was lord of the manor. In the following January Wilkes 
himself was chosen alderman for the ward of Farringdon 
Without, and he thenceforward fought his battles beneath 
the shield of the redoubted municipality which has always 
been the stronghold of liberty while liberty was yet in dan- 
ger. As soon as what had happened at Westminster on the 
morning of the fourth of February was known east of Temple 
Bar, the City gathered itself together for an obstinate duel 
with the Commons, as resolutely and briskly as ever in the 
seventeenth century it made ready to resist the Stuarts. The 
fiery cross at once went round all the haunts of business, and 
that very evening a great gathering of the county voters was 
collected in the Mile End Assembly-rooms. From that time 
onward it became impossible for the bitterest enemies of 
Wilkes even to pretend to regard him as a vulgar and un- 
friended demagogue. The shrewdest, the most respected, 
and (what the court relished least) the wealthiest men that 
ever drew a bill or consigned a cargo contended for the honor 
of proposing or seconding the tribune of the people. The 
zeal of the meeting rose into positive enthusiasm when a City 
magnate of the first order, himself a member of Parliament, 
bidding farewell to the traditional politics of his famil3% an- 
nounced that he would assert the right of constituents to the 
choice of their representatives as long as he had a shilling to 
contribute or a leg on wdiich to hop to Brentford. There 
was no talk of a government candidate ; but, in order to guard 
against a surprise, more than two thousand respectable free- 



1768-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 163 

holders flocked to the hustings at their own charges, and stood 
in pouring rain till their favorite was again member for Mid- 
dlesex, without having been called upon to write a line, to 
speak a sentence, or to spend a farthing. 

The election took place on the sixteenth of February ; and 
on the seventeenth Lord Strange, the most presentable adhe- 
rent of the ministry (for he was a placeman who declined to 
draw his salary), moved that John Wilkes, having been expel- 
led the House, was incapable of serving in Parliament. The 
motion w^as passed by two hundred and thirty-five votes to 
eighty-nine ; and during the progress of the debate a hint was 
thrown out from the Treasury bench that any gentleman who 
had the courage to stand for Middlesex, and who could obtain 
a single score of supporters, should be declared by a resolution 
of the House of Commons to be a duly elected knight of the 
shire. The government electioneering agents accordingly 
searched the clubs for a gentleman who could poll twenty 
freeholders ; but the only candidate wdiom they persuaded to 
come forw^ard fulfilled neither of their conditions. Tlie hope 
of a seat which, if not of roses, would at all events be a cheap 
one, proved sufficiently potent to attract one Dingley, an ex- 
private of the Guards, who had made some money by mechan- 
ical inventions which in themselves would have failed to se- 
cure him the immortality that he owes to one contemptuous 
epithet from the profuse repertory of Junius.' Wilkes was 
unanimously re-elected. His opponent showed himself as 
near the front of the hustings as he could penetrate ; but he 
got no one to nominate him, and retired into private life, if 
we are to believe Junius, with a broken heart, and certainly 
with a broken head. As soon as the Commons met on the 
following afternoon, Rigby moved to annul the election. 

' " Even the miserable Dingley," says Junius to the Duke of Grafton, 
" could not escape the misfortune of your Grace's protection." The most 
prominent among the evils that befell Dingley on account of his med- 
dling with politics was his having been knocked down by an attorney, 
which appears to have impressed the public imagination as an inversion 
of the natural order of things. He died shortly after, of Grafton's friend- 
ship, as Junius would have it, but more probably from natural causes. 



164 THE EAELY HISTOEY OF [Chap. V. 

Burke told his brother-members that Wilkes had grown great 
by their folly, parodying for his purpose a fine passage from 
an old Eoman play which eighteen centuries before had been 
quoted against Pompey ;' and Mr. Thomas Townshend, whose 
name one of the happiest couplets in Goldsmith's " Retalia- 
tion " has in all human probability linked with Burke's for at 
least as many centuries to come, reminded his hearers that a 
heavy account would some day be exacted from them if they 
continued to postpone all useful legislation for the sake of a 
frivolous and interminable squabble. But the House had 
gone too far to retrace its steps ; and the leaders of the Oppo- 
sition allowed the election to be declared null and void with- 
out putting friend or foe to the trouble of a division. 

The temper of the popular party was just then exasperated 
by an Untoward circumstance which had attended the recent 
election for Middlesex, in wdiich Sergeant Gljmn had been 
opposed to Sir William Proctor. Sir AVilliam had hired a 
gang of Irish chairmen, who would gladly have plied their 
cudgels gratis on either side in any quarrel ; and at two in the 
afternoon, while the polling was going on in perfect tranquil- 
lity, and when Glynn was already well to the front, these fel- 
lows were suddenly turned loose npon the scene. Acting with 
the vigor and cohesion which they had learned in a hundred 
faction fights, they overset the tables, seized the books, 
knocked down everybody who had not Proctor's colors in 
his hat, frightened the sheriffs into a public-house, and, to use 
the expression of a bystander, sent the whole county of Mid- 
dlesex flying before them. One poor fellow, the son of a gen- 
tleman in the neighborhood, who had been quietly watching 
the voters as they came and went, died beneath the bludgeon 
of a notorious rufiiau whose most frequent alias was Mac- 
quirk. The murderer was brought to trial and condemned to 
be hanged ; but his Majesty was advised to remit the sentence 



* " Nostra stultitia tu es Magnus." Tlie original line, and the use made 
of it by a Roman actor who was playing to the back benches over the 
heads of fifteen rows of disgusted knights and senators, may bq read in 
one of the earliest letters to Atticus. 



17GS-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 165 

ou grounds wliicli would not have induced a jury of Soutli 
African Boers to acquit a Dutcliman charged with killing a 
Hottentot. Contrasting this sinister clemency with the mili- 
tary execution which had lately been done upon a parcel of 
shop-boys for throwing a few handfuls of mud and calling a 
Scotch sergeant Sawney, the people came to the conclusion 
that, in the view of their rulers, Wilkites might be butchered 
with impunity. But vengeance, which spared the humble in- 
strument, overtook the statesman who by his culpable and in- 
terested lenity had made the crime his own ; for it was the 
pardon of Macquirk that first drew down upon the Duke of 
Grafton the enmity of that writer who has handled his fame 
after such a fashion that it would be well for him if he had 
no fame at all. Junius spoke but the sentiments of all law- 
loving and law-abiding members of the community when he 
asked the prime-minister how it happened that in his hands 
even the mercy of the prerogative was cruelty and oppression 
to the subject.' 

' Those who would enjoy Junius at his best should study the earlier 
letters, before his head was turned and his style debased, and while he 
still confined himself to questions which were within his knowledge and 
his abilities. Until he undertook to outwrite Burke and argue points of 
law with Mansfield, his productions have all the merit of excellent lead- 
ing-articles thrown into a personal, and therefore a more effective, form. 
It is hardly to be expected that he should still be read by people who 
have more than enough to do in keeping themselves conversant with the 
politics of their own day; but it is easy to imagine the delight with 
which a common-councilman who had subscribed his fifty pounds to the 
Society of the Bill of Rights, and had run for his life at Brentford, would 
find such writing as this on his breakfast-table of a morning : 

" As long as the trial of this chairman was depending, it was natural 
enough that government should give him every possible encouragement 
and support. The service for which he was hired, and the spirit with 
which he performed it, made common cause between your Grace and 
him. The minister who by secret corruption invades the freedom of elec- 
tion, and the ruffian who by open violence destroys that freedom, are em- 
barked in the same bottom. They have the same interests, and naturally 
feel for each other. . . . But when this unhappy man had been sol- 
emnly tried, convicted, and condemned ; when it appeared that he had 
been frequently employed in the same service, and that no excuse for him 



166 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

The antagonism between the people and their governors 
was the more alarming because in case of need the authorities 
could only keep the peace by methods which made matters 
worse than if the peace had been left to keep itself. The mild 
but irresistible w^eight of the law was not then represented by 
a body of disciplined policemen whom every respectable cit- 
izen, however angry politics might for the moment have made 
him, had always been accustomed to regard as his servants and 
protectors. The constables, untrained to work in concert, in- 
dignant at having to serve outside their own parish, and much 
more afraid of a rioter's fist than of a magistrate's reprimand, 
were of no value whatever at an emergency ; and behind the 
constables there was nothing but the bullets and bayonets of 
the soldiery. An unpopular candidate who did not -wish to 
commence his relations with his constituents by using his in- 
fluence with the War-office to get them shot had nothing for 
it but to provide himself with a bodj^-guard strong enough to 
procure him a hearing at the nomination, and to bring his 
voters safe and sound into the booths. 

In order to carry out their scheme of usurping the rej^re- 
sentation of Middlesex, the ministers had first to look round 
for a champion not afraid of brickbats, and qualified by his 
antecedents to take the leading part in a struggle "svhich was 
fast assuming the character of a private war. They discovered, 
or thought that they had discovered, the man they wanted in 
Henry Luttrell, a colonel of horse, who had the character of 
being somewhat too ready with his sword, and wdio, in the 

could be drawn either from the innocence of his former life or the sim- 
plicity of his character, was it not hazarding too much to interpose the 
prerogative between this felon and the justice of his country ? You ought 
to have known that an example of this sort was never so necessary as at 
present ; and certainly you must have known that the lot could not have 
fallen on a more guilty object. What system of government is this? You 
are perpetually complaining of the riotous disposition of the lower class 
of people ; yet when the laws have given you the means of making an 
example, in every sense unexceptionable and by far the most likely to 
overawe the multitude, you pardon the offence, and are not ashamed to 
give the sanction of government to the riots you complain of, and even 
to future murders." 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 1G7 

dark days of Irish misery and disaffection wliieli closed the 
centnry, gave memorable proof that if he conld have had his 
will he would have made very short work of the Middlesex 
electors and their privileges. lie left his comfortable Cornish 
borongh with its eleven voters, of whom ten were officers in 
the revenue, on an understanding that as soon as was de- 
cent he should be appointed to one of the best-paid posts on 
the staff ; and the populace firmly believed that he was to be 
rewarded for his heroism by the hand of a daughter of Lord 
Bute, to whose interests liis fatlier had been long and faith- 
fully attached. A political retainer of the most hated among 
Scotchmen, and the member of a family which every Irish 
Catholic regarded much as a Christian in the Middle Ages 
would regard a reputed descendant of Judas,' he destroyed all 
the chance that he ever possessed of standing well in English 
eyes by accepting the support of Lord Holland, whose house, 
half-way between Brentford and the city, formed a conven- 
ient headquarters for electioneering. Supremely indifferent 
to his threefold unpopularity, Luttrell published an advertise- 
ment calling upon all who accounted themselves gentlemen 
to join him in giving a lesson to the mob; but when the day 
came, the dozen or two of cavaliers who responded to his ap- 
peal so little liked the aspect of the streets that they were 
much relieved when their commander let them and their 
horses out through a breach in his garden wall, and conduct- 
ed them to Brentford along a network of back lanes, leaving 
untasted a splendid breakfast which awaited them at Holland 
House. He might have spared his precautions as well as his 
vaunts. Though very different people tp deal with from the 
Connaught potato-farmers whom one day he was to hand over 

* Heury Luttrell, grandfutlier of the candidate for Middlesex, after dis- 
gracing the Irish Catholic party by his excesses, deserted it when Limer- 
ick fell, and was richly rewarded at the expense of the people whom he 
had betrayed, and of a brother who had scorned to join him in his treach- 
ery. There never was a more barefaced instance of that venal defection 
which his countrymen have at all times found it harder to forgive than 
the most flagrant acts of oj^pressiou prompted by consistent hostility to 
their cause. 



168 THE EARLY HISTORY OP [Chap. V. 

by droves to the mercies of the press-gang, or from the pris- 
oner whose face he cut open with a riding-whip when the 
poor creature was ah-eady under the shadow of the gallows, 
the freeholders of Middlesex, so far from being bloodthirsty, 
had no inclination even to be turbulent. Certain that, unless 
the Constitution ceased to exist, they must sooner or later get 
their rights, they listened with good-humor while Stephen 
Fox expounded the claims of Luttrell as a fit and proper can- 
didate for their suffrages, and then repaired to the poll and 
gave AVilkes a majority of nearly four to one.' 

The election was over on Thursday, the thirteenth of April, 
and on Friday it was reversed by the House of Commons. 
Charles Fox, who had been canvassing and haranguing for 
Luttrell all over the county till his head was full of argu- 
ments which he was burning to try upon Parliament, got his 

1 The frequency of riots at this period, and the large space allotted to 
them by its historians, must be ex]jlained by the utter inefBciency of the 
machinery for preserving order — a consideration wliich only aggravates 
the fault of statesmen who so imjustly and gratuitously provoked the 
people. Disturbances were more rife, and the civil arm was weaker, in 
1768 than at any period between the year of Sacheverell and the year of 
Lord George Gordon. The sheriffs, when giving evidence about Glynn's 
election, informed the House of Commons that as soon as the constables 
noticed some dangerous-looking people about, they all disappeared into 
the ale-houses and could not be induced to emerge until the fighting was 
over. A desperate and murderous battle with fire-arms, arising out of a 
trade disj^ute, was maintained in the east end of London from eight in 
the evening till five in the morning without a magistrate daring to show 
himself. Benjamin Franklin, the most trustworthy of observers, was then 
living in Craven Street, and has left some record of what he witnessed. 
Sawyers destroying saw-mills ; coal-heavers pulling down the houses of 
coal - dealers ; sailors on strike unrigging all the outward-bound mer- 
chantmen, and closing the port of London till their pay was raised ; the 
very tailors marching down in their thousands to overawe Parliament — 
such was the asjject which the British capital presented to the decent 
and demure Philadelj)hian. "While I am writing," he says, on the four- 
teenth of May, " a great mob of coal-porters fills the street, carrying a 
wretch of their business upon poles to be ducked, for working at the old 
wages." In these days, before such a procession had got a hundred 
yards down the Strand, the ringleaders would be already on their way 
to Bow Street. 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 1G9 

opportunity in a debate wliicli was short, and but for hiui 
would have been tame, inasmucli as the conclusion was fore- 
gone, and the chief orators were saving themselves for the 
morrow. A Saturday sitting seemed a portentous novelty in 
those idle and pleasant times ; but it was understood that the 
government had a proposal to make of such gravity that, to 
use Rigby's words, it was worth while for the merchants once 
in a way to give up their villas, and the lawyers their fees. 
There was little work done on that Saturday in London 
either by high or low. The approaches to Westminster were 
thronged far and near, and the House was crammed for thir- 
teen consecutive hours by a crowd of eager speakers and 
hearers, transported beyond themselves by emotions the trace 
of which can easily be discerned beneath the conventional 
phraseology of the reporter. Mr. George Onslow, amidst 
a scene such as his father never witnessed during the three- 
and-thirty years of his speakership, or witnessed only when 
Walpole fell, rose from the Treasury bench to move that 
Henry Lawes Luttrell ought to have been returned a knight 
of the shire, to serve in the present Parliament for the county 
of Middlesex. Alderman Beckford, expressing, as was be- 
lieved, the mind of Chatham in his own headlong and fan- 
tastic language, denounced what he characterized as the rank 
Tory doctrine of the ministry with an animation which called 
down upon him a furious rebuke from Onslow. Onslow, in 
his turn, brought George Greuville to his feet, who, waxing 
eloquent in his old age, vindicated the law of the land as 
against the will of the House with such vehemence that, 
when he sat down, he spat blood. Mr. Ralph Payne, a 
youthful rhetorician of the study, who was detected in the 
act of pulling his speech ont of his pocket, received from an 
assembly every third member of which was panting to give 
vent to the passions of the hour in the words of the moment 
such a handling that he was glad to exchange his senatorial 
ambition for the peaceful dignity of a colonial governorship, 
and to seek in Antigua an atmosi^here more endurable than 
that of the House of Commons during one of its periodical 
tornadoes. Another aspirant obtained, but did not merit, a 



170 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

better fate. Charles Fox won the attention of all, and the 
admiration of most, bj a fluency and a fire which promised 
much better things; but, in spite of his sword and his laced 
coat, he was still a schoolboy at heart, and his speech owed its 
immediate success to an impertinence that accorded only too 
well with the prejudices of the hot-brained partisans whom 
lie was addressing, who wanted nothing more refined or accu- 
rate than the assurance that the contest lay between all that 
was respectable on the one side, and the lowest scum of Bil- 
lingsgate and Wapping on the other.' Burke, who compli- 
mented the young aristocrat of yesterday with the honor of 
a rebuke, was hailed by one of those volleys of affected mer- 
riment Muth which the House of Commons, in its worst fits, 
greets an unpalatable statement that cannot be confuted from 
a man too eminent to be refused the semblance of a hearing. 
The insolent impatience, however, which harassed the un- 
daunted and unwearied guardian of constitutional freedom 
throughout the whole course of a noble and unanswerable 
oration, could not stifle the voice of one who justly boasted 
tliat, when he was pleading the cause of the people, he feared 
the laugh of no man. At three in the morning of Sunday 
Luttrell was declared duly elected by a hundred and ninety- 
seven votes to a hundred and forty-threc; — a diminution in the 



' " Stephen Fox," wrote Horace Walpole, " indecently and indiscreetly 
said, ' Wilkes had been chosen by the scum of the earth ' — an expression 
after retorted on his family, his grandfather's birth being of the lowest 
obscurity. Charles Fox, with infinite superiority of parts, was not in- 
ferior to his brother in insolence." Henry Cavendish, who was present, 
which Walpole was not, gives Charles the credit of a piece of vitupera- 
tion which certainly was not worth tlie claiming. 

Stephen Fox's anxiety about the state of public affairs amused his ac- 
quaintances, and the memory of it continued to amuse them when he 
was no longer among the living. Lord Carlisle, writing from Castle 
Howard in 1777, says, "We watch with eager expectation for American 
news. We are very ministerial on this side of the country, but yet we 
want something to keei3 up our spirits. I j^rotest I am like Stephen 
Fox, who used to write in the newspapers and sign himself ' A stander- 
by who has his fears.' " 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. ' 171 

majority, and a still more ominous increase in the minor- 
ity, wliicli proved that Burke had not braved his audience, 
or Grenville shortened his life, for nothing ; and which de- 
terred Lord North from offering any resistance to a pro- 
posal that the electors of Middlesex should be allowed four- 
teen days within which they might petition against a decree 
that reduced them to a political level with Normandy peas- 
ants. 

They petitioned accordingly ; and the hearing of their case 
was fixed for the eighth of May. The House, as usual, com- 
menced public business at two in the afternoon, in spite of 
the remonstrances of an elderly member who entreated his 
colleagues, as they valued their health, to return to the early 
hours of their ancestors, little foreseeing that two in the af- 
ternoon would come to be the time for beginning what, in 
compliance with the perverted habits of his descendants, is 
denominated a morning sitting. Although Parliament was 
on the eve of breaking up for the summer, the attendance 
was the largest that had been known throuo;hout that stirring 
session. The ministers had been careful to bring back from 
Paris those of their men who had anticipated the recess, and 
to summon others from the North who hitherto had not 
thought it worth while to leave their country-houses ; and it 
was an allusion which Burke made in the course of the even- 
ing to the industry of the Treasury officials that first rendered 
tlie term " whipping in " classical. Never, to all appearance, 
had there been a less favorable occasion for a very young 
man who had no pretence to the stores of special knowledge 
which are presumed to lurk beneath the folds of the long 
robe. The debate was remembered in the Inns of Court as 
the greatest field night which the profession had enjoyed for 
a generation. The discussion was opened by paid advocates; 
though John Lee, the counsel for the petitioners, a distin- 
guished lawyer whom it is on record that the court tried in 
vain to buy, M-as quite the man to have done so congenial a 
piece of work for nothing ; while Sergeant "VVhitaker, who 
led on the other side, would gladly have returned his fee ten 
times over to have been out of the case, when he found that 



172 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

his activity against Wilkes had suggested him as a victim for 
the merciless mimicry of Foote.' 

After the wigs and gowns had played their part, and the 
House was left to make up its mind by the aid of its own 
lights, few members ventured to speak, and still fewer to 
speak at length, except those who were learned by title, or 
those whose learning was so extensive and so profound that 
a seat on the woolsack would have added little to the author- 
ity with which they discom'sed on all that related to the 
Constitution. Dr. Blackstone, who had deserted the studies 
which have given him a fame worth twenty judgeships for 
the hot and sordid arena of party strife, where the richer 
prizes of his calling could alone be won, delivered it as his 
"firm and unbiassed opinion" that Mr. Wilkes was disquali- 
fied by common-law from sitting in Parliament, lie was si- 
lenced, to the delight of the profane, by a layman who, on 
such a point, was every whit as good a lawyer as himself ; 
for George Grenville triumphantly cited the passage in the 
first and ungarbled edition of the " Commentaries " where the 
doctor had laid down, witli the clearness which is his distin- 

' Foote, who had foiled as an actor in plays "vrritten by others, made a 
great and continuous success over a period of thirty years, from 1747 on- 
wards, by a series of performances something between the comedies of 
Colman and the " At Homes " of Mathews. The central attraction in each 
of Foote's pieces consisted in one or more characters, which were un- 
derstood to be modelled from living notabilities, whose gait, dress, tone, 
and gesture were reproduced with Aristophanic fidelity. After carrying 
his imitations through the whole gamut of respectability from Whitefield 
down to Dr. Dodd, Foote at length bethought himself of bringing on the 
stage a vulgar and dissolute fine lady whom the town should recognize 
as the Duchess of Kingston. That infamous virago had recourse to a 
nameless and horrible retaliation, against wliich poor Foote's holiday 
weapons were powerless; and he died a broken man in 1777, leaving a 
collection of dramas, flimsy, but not worthless, as literature, and highly 
valuable as a picture-gallery of manners. Whitaker was taken off in the 
" Lame Lover" as Sergeant Circuit ; an amusing personage, but not nearly 
so amusing as the Lame Lover himself. 

Fox, though he had suftered at his hands, thought Foote " excellent " 
both as a writer and an actor ; and in private society, with every inten- 
tion to ignore his presence, he had, like others, found him irresistible. 



17G8-G9.] CIIxVKLES JAMES FOX. 173 

guisliing merit, tliat every British subject, unless lie came 
within certain definite categories of discLualification which did 
not include Wilkes, was eligible of common right. Thurlow, 
soon to be solicitor-general, spoke temperately for the minis- 
ters ; and Sir Fletcher Norton, who had been attorney-gen- 
eral until he got something better, forgetting, or more proba- 
bly not caring, that the whole political and legal world knew 
him as the author of the celebrated apothegm that a judge 
who did his duty would regard a resolution of the House of 
Commons no more than the bluster of so many drunken por- 
ters, had now the face to maintain that such a resolution pos- 
sessed the binding force of the ancient and immemorial tradi- 
tions and principles on which are founded the obhgation of a 
contract and the ownership of an estate. Wedderburn, who 
had entered Parliament as one of Bute's henchmen, and who 
still sat for a ministerial borough, declared himself for the 
Middlesex electors with the elegant melancholy of a patriot 
who was sacrificing everything to his conscience, and the 
consummate art of a schemer intent upon nothing but his 
interests. Those honorable and learned members who went 
the Northern circuit, and who knew Wedderburn's profes- 
sional history, heard with surprise that one who had thought 
nothing of violating, to his own pecuniary profit, the unwrit- 
ten custom of the bar was prepared to make himself a martyr 
for the sacredness of the common -law;' but no such un- 
worthy scepticism troubled the Whig country gentlemen, who 
delivered themselves up, without suspicion or reserve, to the 
pleasure of applauding the eloquence and extolling the in- 
tegrity of a jurist in whom they already recognized a second 
Somers. Wedderburn had outdone Grenville, and Burke far 
outdid Wedderburn. In a magnificent declamation, woven 
close with new thoughts and old facts, he urged the House 
to reflect upon the perils that would ensue if members were 
to be expelled and nominated by the majority of the day. 

* Lord Campbell, iu chapter clxiv. of his " Lives of the Chancellors," nar- 
rates, in a manner nothing short of thrilling, how Wedderburn, by prac- 
tice sharper than sharp, got hold of the business of an attorney-general 
who had left circuit. 



174: THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

Was that assembly, he asked, a cahn sanctuary of justice into 
which no passion or corruption entered? Or was it rather 
the theatre and stage on which the several factions had fought 
their battles, and where they had in turn exercised on each 
other their detestable vengeance? The ministers, in their 
eagerness to justify a bad deed by bad examples, had dug up 
the shields and helmets which showed that the House had 
once been the field of blood, and had gathered together an 
arsenal of fatal precedents from the evil years of the civil 
wars, when the majority expelled the minority, and was itself 
expelled in turn ; when the Lower House was reduced to 
forty-six members, and the Upper House abolished by a curt 
and hasty resolution of the Commons; when the king was 
beheaded, and the standing army brought in to overawe Par- 
liament, and injustice was heaped upon injustice, as if man 
would scale heaven. 

AYedderburn and Burke were still unanswered when Charles 
Fox rose ; but when he resumed his seat, the supporters of the 
ministers, and most of their oj^ponents, pronounced that the 
lawyer and the statesman had both met their match. How 
commanding must have been the manner of the young speaker, 
how prompt his ideas, and how apt and forcible the language 
in which he clothed them, may be estimated by comparing 
the effect of his rhetoric upon those who were present, and 
the fame of it among those who heard it at second-hand, with 
the scanty morsels of his argument which have survived the 
evening on which it was delivered. The two or three sen- 
tences which oblivion, so kind to him as long as he needed 
her services, has permitted to stand in judgment against him 
have a flavor of boyishness about them for M'hich nothing 
could have compensated except rare and premature excellence 
in the outward accomplishments of the orator. He had still 
enough of the undergraduate in him to imagine that he was 
speaking like a statesman when he informed the House that 
he should adore Colonel Luttrell to the last day of his life for 
his noble action, and that he would not take the will of the 
people from a few demagogues, any more than he would take 
the will of God Almighty from a few priests. But what he 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 175 

had to say lie said in sucli a manner tliat he came unscathed 
out of a controversy on an intricate point of hiw with law- 
yers who were straining every nerve to make or sustain a pro- 
fessional reputation of the very first order. Horace Walpole, 
who had a grudge against Lord Holland and all tliat belonged 
to him, bears reluctant testimony to the impression produced 
upon the old stagers of the Commons by the appearance in 
their midst of one who was born a debater as Bonaparte was 
born a general. Mr. Henry Cavendish, the volunteer reporter 
of an otherwise almost unreported Parliament, was betrayed 
into breaking the rule of abstinence from personal criticism 
which is among the canons of his art, and, though himself a 
violent partisan of Wilkes, could not forbear from noticing 
that '" Mr. Charles Fox spoke very well." If such was the in- 
voluntary tribute which the young man's deserts exacted from 
those who loved neither his cause nor his family, it is eas}^ to 
conceive the satisfaction with which the fondest of parents 
and the most cynical of politicians learned that his son had 
already made good a place in the front rank of parliamentary 
combat by the ability that he had displayed against the most 
formidable exponents of doctrines which in tlie vocabulary of 
Holland House were designated as the cant of patriotism. In 
a letter where a father's pride shows not ungracefully through 
the measured and business-like phraseology of a veteran of St. 
Stephen's, Lord Holland refers to the discussion of the eighth 
of May, "in which," he says, "I am told, and I willingly be- 
lieve it, tliat Charles Fox spoke extremely well. It was all 
offhand, all argumentative, in reply to Mr. Burke and Mr. 
Wedderburn, and excessively well indeed. I hear it spoke 
of by everybody as a most extraordinary thing, and I am, you 
see, not a little pleased with it. My son Ste. spoke too, and 
(as they say he always does) very short and to the purpose. 
They neither of them aim at oratory, make apologies, or speak 
of themselves, but go directly to the purpose ; so I do not 
doubt they will continue speakers. But I am told Charles can 
never make a better speech than he did on Monday." ' 

' The speech which gave such delight to Lord Holland is nowhere 



176 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

At two in the morning on Tuesday Luttrell's election was 
confirmed by two hundred and twenty-one votes to a hundred 
and fifty-two, and later in the same day the king prorogued 
Parliament. He concluded his speech by laying a solemn in- 
junction upon the Peers, and Commoners to exert themselves, 
each in their several counties, for the maintenance of that 
public peace which never needed to have been broken if he 
liad been content to rule as his gran dsire, and his grandsire's 
prudent and cool-headed adviser, had ruled before him. " Qui- 
eta non movere,^^ said Horace Walpole, " was my father's motto, 
and he never found it a silly one." It was useless for the na- 
tion to pray that it might be godly and quietly governed, so 
long as it had ministers whose characters were such that the 
highest tribute they could pay to religion was to keep outside 
the church doors, except on the day when they took the sacra- 
ment in order to qualify for their offices, and so long as it was 
ruled by a sovereign who turned his realm upside-down be- 
cause he could not be convinced that four years of exile were 
a sufficient punishment for a political lecture which George 
the First would have passed over with indifference, and George 
the Second would have accepted as deserved.' But the third 

mentioned •without some indication of the surprise that was excited by 
its extraordinary merit. Sir Charles Bunbury, who had been selected 
from among many rivals for the short-lived honor of being married to 
Lady Sarah Lennox, was at Paris when he received his report of what at 
that time he might still be supposed to view as a fomily triumph. " Mr. 
Charles Fox," writes his correspondent, " who, I suppose, was your school- 
fellow, and who is but twenty, made a great figure in the debate last 
night upon the petition of the Middlesex freeholders. He spoke with 
great spirit, in very parliamentary language, and entered very deeply into 
the question on constitutional principles." 

* When Parliament met in the winter of 1756, a mock king's speech 
was hawked about the streets. The ministers urged that the authors 
should be unearthed and punished, but George the Second expressed a 
hope that the penalty would be of the mildest, as he had read both 
speeches, and, so far as he could understand them, tliought the spurious 
one the better of the two. The lords were foolish enough to press the 
matter, and the culprit was condemned to fine and imprisonment ; but 
the king waited for his opportunity, and took care that, after a due in- 
terval, the fine should be remitted and the imprisonment curtailed. 



J768-G9.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 177 

George wonld not be satisfied without dragging liis critic to 
the liglit of day, and forcing him in self-defence to assume the 
attitude of a rival whom a good half of his subjects preferred 
to himself. He could not stir abroad without meeting some 
evidence of his unpopularit}^, which he was too much of a 
man to shrink from facing ; and the partisans of his adversary 
came to seek him under his very roof, sometimes in the shape 
of an unruly mob, and sometimes of grave and authoritative 
depntations, armed with a respectful but resolute protest 
against a policy which the petitioners, as by custom bound, 
attributed to his ministers, but which he and the}^ well knew 
to be his own. When a counter-deputation was organized, and 
a hundred or so of City merchants, or people who passed for 
such, set forth to St. James's for the purpose of presenting a 
loyal address, the native Londoners, indignant at the notion 
of Jews and Dutchmen presuming to thank the king for hav- 
ing hindered Englishmen from exercising their political rights, 
shut the gates of Temple Bar, stopped the coaches, and so mal- 
treated their occupants that out of the whole cavalcade hardly 
a dozen reached their destination, after a delay which scandal- 
ized the Presence-chamber, and in such a pickle as disturbed 
it out of its proprieties. The lord steward himself went 
down into the crowd, and, when his white staff was broken, 
betook himself to his hands, w^hich in his case were noted 
weapons, and infused such spirit into the guard that fifteen 
of the rioters were arrested; but the grand -jury of Mid- 
dlesex threw out the bills, and secured impunity for the 
most outrageous insult that any of our monarchs had en- 
dured since James the Second was hustled by the Kentish 
fishermen.' 



' The ballad-makers celebrated the events of the day in an Amoebean 
poem entitled " A Dialogue at St. James's Gate between a Lord and the 
Mob." The case is very fairly put on both sides. The Mob says, 

" Let elections be free, and whoever we choose, 
His seat in the House you should never refuse ; 
And if great men were honest, the poor would be quiet ; 
So yourselves you may thank for this bustle and riot." 
12 



178 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

WJiile George the Third, if he had listened to timid coun- 
sellors, would have remained a prisoner in his own jDalace, 
"Wilkes, whether in jail or out of it, inspired a loyalty, and ex- 
erted a power which any monarch might have envied. Junius, 
who, when he was dealing with dukes and commanders-in- 
chief, thought a single courteous sentence a waste of ink, del- 
uged liim with private letters of advice as reverential, and, it 
must be allowed, as tedious, as courtly bishop ever penned for 
the edification of royal pupil. He had his flatterers and his 
champions; his volunteer grand-cellarei'S and stewards of the 
household; his inspired scribes in every newspaper, and his 
laureates on every curbstone. His revenues for the time be- 
ing, if not princely according to English ideas, would have 
been despised by few indeed among the minor potentates who 
then figured in the Ahnanach de GoiJia. The Whig states- 
men had for some years past subscribed among themselves to 
provide him with an income — a more judicious use of their 
party fund than if they had spent the same amount twenty 

The Peer replies, 

" YouVe insulted the Crown, and for these honest cits, 
You've scared the poor gentlemen out of their wits. 
"When they mustered on 'Change they were decent and clean. 
But are now so bedaubed they're not fit to be seen. 
If such tumults as these were in France or in Spain, 
Five hundred by this time had surely been slain : 
But the king loves you all with such ardent aft'ection 
He'd lay down his life for the people's protection." 

Whether or not the king loved, or could be expected to love, his peo- 
ple at that ijrecise moment, he certainly was not afraid of them. His cool- 
ness then, and on a subsequent occasion when he was hooted on his way 
to the House of Lords, roused the admiration even of those wdio them- 
selves were most indifiierent to the hostility of the populace. " He carried 
himself so," wrote Lord Holland, "that it was hard to know whether he 
was concerned or not. A lord who is near him told me that after the 
great riot at St. James's, or rather in the midst of it, you could not find 
out, either in his countenance or his conversation, that everything was 
not quiet as usual." Lord Holland, who never could conceive of people 
acting either wisely or foolishly from any motive but one, was absurd 
enough to believe that tlie mob had been hired by French gold. 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 179 

times over in tlic piircliasc of rotten boronglis. "\Ylien these 
secret supplies failed to keep pace with the manifold demands 
of his public position and his somewhat generous notions of 
personal comfort, a number of baronets, aldermen, and mem- 
bers of the House of Connnons formed themselves into an as- 
sociation with a title which recalled the most significant his- 
torical reminiscences, and a political programme ambitions 
enough to keep tlie liberalism of the country busily employed 
for fifty years to come. But the Society for Supporting the 
Bill of Bights found that it had quite as much as it could do 
in supporting AViikes; and the contributions which were to 
have been devoted to impeaching ministers and restoring an- 
nual parliaments soon went in paying his outstanding debts, 
and enabling him to drink claret and keep a French valet. 
In the course of eighteen months, through this agency alone, 
at least as man}'- thousand pounds had been raised and dis- 
bursed in his behalf.' lie was constantly receiving less splen- 

* The Society for tlie Bill of Rights drained a very wide area of patri- 
otic munificence. Newcastle-on-Tyne subscribed handsomely. The As- 
sembly of South Carolina, in a very full house, voted as much of their 
paper currency as would purchase bills of exchange for fifteen hundred 
pounds sterling. A great deal of money came to Wilkes direct. A no- 
bleman presented him with three hundred pounds as late as 1778. Two 
ladies of rank gave him a hundred pounds apiece ; and a party of gen- 
tlemen who used a tavern near Covent Garden requested him to accept 
a purse of twenty guineas and a hamper of their favorite liquor. 

Nothing could exceed the adoration of which Wilkes long continued 
to be the object, or the variety of the forms in which it was expressed. 
In July, 1769, a clergyman pulled the nose of a Scotch naval officer for 
talking disparagingly of the member for Middlesex, and then ran him 
through the sword-arm in Hyde Park. The Chevalier d'Eon sent Wilkes 
a dozen smoked Russian tongues on his birthday, with a wish that they 
had the eloquence of Cicero and the delicacy of Voltaire, in order wor- 
thily to celel)rate the occasion. A gentleman of Abergavenny announced 
his intention to construct a miniature Stonehenge, dedicated to Liberty, 
and begged of him " a few strong words " by way of an inscription. An- 
other correspondent wrote to oifer his friendship and fortune ; proposed 
to marry his daughter, as an excuse for giving Wilkes himself ten or fif- 
teen thousand pounds; and ended by leaving him a handsome legacy. 
Large and frequent tribute came from an unknown person who signed 



180 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

did, but very material, testimonials of sj'mpathy from every 
class of his fellow-countrymen. Wine, game, fruit, and poul- 
try readied him nearly every day, and from most counties 
south of the Tweed. Those who had nothing else to give 
placed their suffrages at his disposal. lie nominated mem- 
bers of Parliament, sheriffs and recorders of London, and 
mayors of county towns at his pleasure. The theatres were 
his own from the first.' Garrick, who, when playing Hastings 
in " Jane Shore," had pronounced some lines derogatory to 
the majesty of the people with such an emphasis as would 
have been laid upon them by a baron and a courtier of the 
fifteenth century, found that it was safer to quarrel with the 
lord chamberlain than with the unofiicial censors who watch- 
ed the stage in thd interests of Wilkes and liberty, and was 
glad to get off with nothing more severe than a friendly ad- 
monition. Captive as he might be, it was no light matter to 
trifle with a man whose name or sj'mboP was chalked upon 
every door and shutter between Paddington and Brentford, 
and was seldom out of the sight of a traveller between Brent- 

himself Philo-Wilkes, and who addressed bis hero as "Eximious Sir." 
As for poetry, or what its authors thought such, Wilkes was nothing less 
than the Ma?cenas of the whole Churchill school until it had drunk it- 
self into extinction. With his jDublic f;\me and his long credit, the only 
form of opulence known in that circle, he commanded the sincere and 
devoted admiration of those ill-starred and ill-deserving bards. One ex- 
tract from poor Eobert Lloyd will more than suffice as a specimen of 
their encomiums : 

"Wilkes, thy honored name, 
Built on the solid base of patriot fame. 
Shall in truth's page to latest years descend, 
And babes unborn shall hail thee England's friend." 

' During the period of his first persecution, when the king was at Drury 
Lane, a piece was given out for the next night called " All in the Wrong." 
Tiie galleries at once saw their chance, and cried, amidst general clajp- 
ping of hands, " Let lis be all in the right. Wilkes and Liberty !" 

- Alexander Cruden used to vary the labor of revising the third edi- 
tion of the Concordance by wiping out Number 45, wherever he saw it, 
with a great sponge which he carried with him on his walks — a task 
which, as his biographer relates, defied even such industry as his. 



17G8-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 181 

ford and Wiiieliester ; and who hung in cfiigy on the sign- 
posts of half the ale-houses in the kingdom, swinging (so he 
heard, or pretended to have heard, a loyal old lady say as he 
walked behind her) everywhere but where he ought. When 
he brought his action against the Earl of Halifax, the surviv- 
or of the two secretaries of state wdio, six years before, had 
launched the immortal general warrant which had been the 
beginning of mischief, the jurymen imagined that they had 
established their character for patriotism by giving him dam- 
ages to the amount of four thousand pounds ; but they had 
failed to make allowance for the exacting affection of tlie pop- 
ulace, who thought their champion moderate in estimating 
his wrongs at five times that paltry sum ; and when the ver- 
dict was known, the gentlemen who were responsible for it 
had to be smuggled out of court along a back passage, and to 
fly, if not for their lives, at any rate for their periwigs. The 
most eminent statesmen, the most persuasive orators, were 
eager to conjure with tlie name of Wilkes, and the potency 
of the spell seldom fell short of their expectations ; but when 
the gale was raised, and they desired to turn it to their own 
account, they discovered that the allegiance of the elemental 
forces was due to the talisman, and not to themselves. The 
Whigs, as Rigby justly observed, endeavored to separate the 
cause from the man, without perceiving that he alone had all 
the popularity which they were struggling to obtain. " If," 
said Horace Walpole, "the Parliament is dissolved, Lord Chat- 
ham and Lord Kockingliam may separately flatter themselves, 
but the next Parliament Avill be Wilkes's." The roar of ap- 
plause, which deafened Walpole and Rigby, penetrated even 
to the ears of a recluse in whose solitude the tumult of poli- 
tics sounded faint and indistinct like the murmur of a distant 
city. "Whether tlie nation is worshipping Mr.Wilkcs or any 
other idol is of little moment to one who hopes, and believes, 
that he shall shortly stand in the presence of the great and 
blessed God." So wrote poor Cowper in 1TG8, while he still 
ventured to connect eternity with hope. 

History, which is very civil to tlie reformers who swore by 
Brougham and the free-traders who swore by Cobden, has 



r- 



182 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

seldom any but hard or slighting words for the devotion and 
fidelity of the Wilkites. But strong emotions, which prevail 
among all classes, and outlast many years, are generally of a 
nature which may be analyzed without bringing discredit on 
the heads or the hearts of those who entertain tliem. The mass 
of the community, which had little cause to bless or trust the 
House of Commons, was firmly persuaded that no one could 
be excluded from Parliament for any other reason tlian be- 
cause he was too good to belong to it. George Grenville truly 
prophesied that whenever a calamity befell tlie State, the mul- 
titude would account for it by a theory which satisfied all the 
requirements of popular logic. " Ay," they would say, " if 
Master Wilkes had been there, he would have prevented it. 
They knew that right well, and therefore they would not 
suffer him to come among them." ' The sagacious instinct 
which expressed itself after this homely fashion on club-night 
in the tavern, and during the meal-hour at the factorj", was 
interpreted into the language of political philosophy in a trea- 
tise which young Englishmen destined for a public career 
would do well to study with something of the attention 
M'hich they now expend on Aristotle^s speculations as to 
whether the citizens of a well-ordered State should all dine 
at a common table. Burke's great pamphlet on the " Discon- 
tents" showed with marvellous clearness, and, considering 
who was its author, with still more remarkable brevity, that 
the patriots of 1769, when the}' protected Wilkes in his rights, 
were in truth defending the commonwealth against an attack 
upon its liberties more covert and less direct, but quite as de- 
termined, as that which was planned by Strafford and repelled 
by the Long Parliament. The question of old had been 
whether the king was to tax and govern in his own name ; 
but that issue had been decided on Marston Moor. There 
now had arisen the equally momentous question whether he 
was to tax and govern in the name of the Parliament. With 
ministers whom the Crown appointed, an Upper House which 
it might increase at will, and a Lower House full of men who 

' Caveudisirs Debates; February 3, 17G9. 



17G8-C.'>.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 183 

had bonglit their seats and sold themselves, there was no check 
upon the excesses and follies of arbitrary authority except the 
presence here and there on the benches of members endowed 
with a " spirit of independence carried to some degree of en- 
thusiasm, and an inquisitive character to discover and a bold 
one to display every corruption and every error of govern- 
ment."' Those were the qualities (so Burke reasoned) which 
recommended a candidate to the few constituencies that still 
could be called free and open ; but they were distasteful to 
the professors of this doctrine of personal government that 
had been resuscitated after the lapse of a century and a quar- 
ter. These gentlemen, well aware that the deterrent force of 
an example depended on other circumstances than on the 
number of victims, and that the arrest of five members, if 
successfully conducted, would formerly have stifled liberty as 
effectually as the execution of fift}^, had now resolved by the 
expulsion of one to establish in the minds of all the fatal con- 
viction that "the favor of the people was not so sure a road 
as the favor of the court, even to popular honors and popular 
trusts." From the Restoration onwards, and still more decid- 
edly since the Revolution, the good, opinion of the people had 
been the avenue which led to the greatest honors and emolu- 
ments in the gift of the Crown. Henceforward the principle 
was to be reversed, and the partiality of the Court was to be- 
come the only sure way of obtaining and holding even those 
honors which ought to be in the disposal of the people. 

To unmask this conspiracy against the nation, and to with- 
stand it to the death, was a duty which the Whig party could 
not have shirked without making Yane and Russell turn in 
their graves. Lord Rockingham and his followers were a 
mere handful ; but when they faced the Court, they knew that 
they had the country behind them. Burke, a master in the 
art of putting into the most attractive form those incentives to 
political action which no true-bred Whig statesman ever could 
or ever will resist, explained to his leader, in a series of skilful 
letters, that the Middlesex election united the two conditions 
essential to a good party question, of being at once popular 
and practical. " The people," he said, " feel upon this and 



184 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

upon no other ground of our opposition. We never have had, 
and we never shall have, a matter in every way so calculated 
to engage them ; and if the spirit excited upon this occasion 
were suffered to flatten and evaporate, you would And it difli- 
cult to collect it again when you miglit have the greatest oc- 
casion for it." And then he clenched his argument with an 
appeal to a maxim of policy that has earned the Whigs all the 
success and most of the abuse which between his day and ours 
have fallen to their share. "It was the characteristic," lie 
wrote, "of your lordship and your friends never to take up 
anything as a grievance when you did not mean in good ear- 
nest to have it reformed." 

Tliey were in earnest now, and fully resolved not to relax 
their efforts until the breach in the Constitution had been se- 
curely and durably repaired. The day after Parliament was 
up, seventy-two members of the minority dined together at 
the Thatched House Tavern, and toasted the " Rights of Elec- 
tors," the " Freedom of Debate," and the " First Edition of 
Dr. Blackstone's ' Commentaries.' " The hero of the evening 
was AYedderburn, who, as usage demanded, had placed his seat 
once more at the disposal of the patron against whose views 
he had voted and spoken. He was rewarded by hearing the 
health of the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds drunk with 
three times three ; and the cheering swelled into a volume 
which exceeded the power of convivial aritlimetic to compute 
when, kissing the bottle, and laughing behind it at the dupes 
who did not know an adventurer when they saw one, he swore 
that he did from his soul denounce, detest, and abjure that 
damnable doctrine and position that a resolution of the House 
of Commons can make, alter, suspend, abrogate, or annihilate 
the law of the land.' Fortified by the exchange of patriotic 
sentiments, and primed with one -and -twenty bumpers, the 
Whig squires hastened down to their counties and fell to the 



* Lord Clive, the levicath.in of Ijoronglimongers, -who as an admirer and 
adherent of George Grenville was temporarily connected with the Oppo- 
sition, placed another seat at the disposal of Wedderburn on the morrow 
of the day that he resigned his old one. 



17(J8-G9.] CHARLES JAIMES FOX. 185 

work of stirring public opinion and concentrating it upon the 
point at issue by sucli primitive and clumsy methods as sug- 
gested themselves before the Catholic Association and the 
Anti-Corn-law League had brought agitation to the level of 
an exact science. The word was passed to petition the throne 
for redress of grievances. Burke, Avho directed the movement, 
informed his coadjutors, as the fruit of long observation, that 
the people about the Court cared very little whether the occu- 
pants of the Treasury bench had a hard or an easy time of it, 
so long as no manifestations of popular dissatisfaction obtrud- 
ed themselves upon the royal presence. A string of sulky 
common-councilmen or justices of the peace, filing through 
the rooms at St. James's with an address about their invaded 
birthrights and the valor of their forefathers, and expecting 
to be received as graciously as if they were there to congratu- 
late the king upon the birth of a princess, \vould do more than 
a score of parliamentary debates to arouse in Ge6rge the 
Third a suspicion that his scheme for governing the country 
by weak, divided, and dependent administrations might end 
by being as disagreeable to himself as it was distressing to his 
subjects.' 

Middlesex led the way, helping herself in order that she 
might be helped by others. Wiltshire and Worcestershire and 
Surrey were not slow to follow her example. The Kentish 
petition bore the signatures of two thousand seven hundred 
freeholders ; though three skins of parchment which had been 
going the round of the hop-districts were not forthcoming. 
Wedderburn drafted the Yorkshire address, and made a prog- 



• " The Middlesex petition," wrote Rigby, on the twenty-fourth of May, 
1769, "was brought to court to-day. The man who delivered it to the 
king, his name is Askew. His companions were Sergeant Glynn ; an old 
parson, Dr. Wilson, prebend of Westminster; Messrs. Townshend, Saw- 
bridge, Bellas, and one other ill-looking fellow, whose name I could not 
learn. His Majesty received it with proper contempt, not speaking to 
any one of them ; but an impropriety seems to have been committed by 
their being ])ermitted to kiss the king's hand, all of them except the old 
parson and Sawbridge." The reasons for appealing direct to the king- 
are very well put in Burke's letter to Lord Rockingham of July 3. 



186 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

ress through the tliree ridings, declaiming against phicemen 
and turncoats with a success which is said to have inspired 
Wilkes with a short-sighted and most superfluous jealousy. 
Burke undertook the county which he had honored by choos- 
ing for his home, and arranged that the voice of Bucking- 
hamshire should declare itself by the good old-fashioned proc- 
ess which had been familiar to Hampden. The grand-jury 
voted a county meeting, which was advertised by handbills 
circulated at the races. When the day came, a local member 
of Parliament, who had been active for Wilkes at Westmin- 
ster, gave spirit to the affair by riding into Aylesbury at the 
head of his tenantry. The assembly was moderated by the 
judgment and animated by the eloquence of the greatest 
writer and thinker who has ever given himself wholly to 
politics, and who on that occasion made it his pride to forget 
that he was anything more than a farmer of Buckinghamshire. 
And the proceedings were countenanced by tlie presence of 
George Grenville's son and heir,' and crowned by a dinner 
for which every freeholder, from Lord Temple dowuNvards, 
paid his shilling for himself ; though the Whig landowners 
took care that there should be plenty of good wine in which 
to drink through a list of toasts that embraced the entire body 
of AVhig principles. 

It was not in every county, however, that the most power- 
ful nobleman was an ex-lord lieutenant, still sore from his 
dismissal. Wherever a great Whig proprietor was not irrec- 
oncilably embroiled with the Court, the ministry worked upon 
his hopes with every bait that official ingenuity could devise, 
and upon his fears with an argument which, as things then 
stood, could not easily be answered. "The king," it was 
urged, " will regard your remonstrances and addresses as so 
much spoiled sheepskin. You may make fine speeches about 
the Bill of Rights, and drink to the immortal memory of 
Lord Chief-justice Holt,' from now till the next general elec- 



1 " A very sensible boy," said Burke, " and as well disposed to a little 
faction as any of his family." 

= Lord Chief-justice Holt was just then enjoying an enormous posthu- 



176S-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. IS 7 

tion, and Lord Montagu's butler and Mr. Eliot's boatmen 
will still vote as their nuisters bid them. When you liave ap- 
pealed to the country, and have got (as in the present state of 
the representation you know very well that you will get) 
nothing for your pains, what will remain to 3'ou except an 
appeal to the sword? Unless you are prepared to go into re- 
bellion against your own great and glorious settlement, you had 
best leave this business of petitioning to others." AVith such 
language in his mouth, Kigby made a summer tour through 
the east of England, and, by the admission of his opponents, 
checkmated the party of action in at least three counties. 
His patron was less successful in another quarter. The Duke 
of Bedford, by a freak of fortune, as his descendants dutifully 
maintain, but more probably from one of those subtle and inde- 
finable external peculiarities the memory of Mdiich dies with the 
dead, had contrived to monopolize a share of the public hatred 
wliich, if apportioned among his followers, would have given 
each of them almost as much as he deserved.* A crack-brained 

mous popularity on account of the spirit with which, iu tlie reign of Anne, 
he maintained the authority of tlie Court of Queen's Bench against tlie 
arbitrary encroachments of the Commons. The Wilkitcs made much of 
an apocryplial story about liis having threatened to commit the Speaker 
to Newgate. 

' Walpole, who calls the Duke of Bedford " a man of inflexible honesty 
and good-will to his country," says that his manner was impetuous, but 
that he was not aware of it. " He is too warm and overbearing for the 
•world to think well of him ;" so the duke would say of a statesman whose 
demeanor, whatever it might be, was more to the taste of the world than 
his own. This single touch, to those who have noticed how it is that 
public men come to be liked or disliked, goes further to explain the 
duke's unpopularity than all the malicious and unfounded stories (the 
consequence of that unpojDularity, and not the cause of it) which Junius 
garnished and dished up to the eternal dishonor of the libeller rather 
than of the libelled. When one who w^as bountiful up to the utmost limits 
of common-sense was reviled as a skinflint; when a rigid patriot was 
charged with having eaten foreign bribes ; Avhen a father as loving and 
far wiser than Lord Holland was held up to execration for having in- 
sulted the memory of an only son, whose death all but killed him — it may 
reasonably be concluded that nothing very bad could be proved against 
the object of such random calumnies. It is sa^:isfactory to know that 



188 THE EARLY IIISTOUY OF [Chap. V. 

Plymouth doctor, whose practice was not so large but that he 
had plenty of leisure for politics, was canvassing Devonshire 
for signatures to a petition praying the king to discard his 
ministers. The Bedfords, terrified by the threatened hostility 
of a county which, if it got its rights, would have sent to Par- 
liament five-and-twenty members, adjured their chief to helj) 
them with his influence in a district where he exercised a 
princely charity. The duke, always ready, at any cost, to 
oblige adherents who gave him nothing in return except rol- 
licking company which he should have been ashamed of en- 
joying, and periodical news-letters containing more impu- 
dence than wit, went down to the West of England, and with 
difficulty got back alive. He was safe as long as he stayed in 
Tavistock, where his meat was in every mouth, and cloth of 
his ordering on every loom ; but he was stoned in the High 
Street of Honiton, and literally hunted out of the town with 
a pack of bulldogs ; and at Exeter the vergers tried in vain to 
keep the mob out of the cathedral when it was known that 
he was seated in the stalls. 

While the ministers, by pla^'ing on the weakness of indi- 
viduals, might hope to stifle opinion in counties which, like 
Nottinghamshire as described b}^ Sir George Savile, consisted 
of " four dukes, two lords, and three rabbit-warrens," they 
were powerless in the great cities, where men were afraid of 
nothing except the ill-will of the multitude. , Bristol voted 
contempt for its member, who had been bitter against Wilkes. 
Westminster petitioned, and Newcastle ; and a remonstrance 
to the king, outspoken to audacity, was sanctioned at a gen- 

Jiiuius had entirely to himself the gratification which tlie most infamous 
of all his slanders appeared to give him. Humbler lampooners, who usu- 
ally were only too glad to pick up his cast-ofi" weapons, would have noth- 
ing to do with this poisoned shaft. The only tolerable couplets in a dull 
dialogue of the dead between Bedford and Beckford represent the duke 
as speaking with feeling of his irreparable loss : 

" Though fate, my Tavistock, soon set thee free, 
And early stole thee from the world and me, 
Thy merits ever will that world deplore, 
And thou wait live when I shall be no more." 



17f.6-G9.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. ISO 

eral meeting of the Livery in Guildhall, amidst a thunder of 
applause which, as Burke told Lord Kockingham, raised the 
idea that he had previously entertained of the effect of the 
human voice. The word had gone forth from the headquar- 
ters of the Opposition to prepare addresses calling for an im- 
mediate dissolution, in spite of Lord l^orth's solemn warning 
that any such document would render all who signed it guilty 
of a breach of privilege, to be avenged with the gravest penal- 
ties that Parliament could inflict. But the City guilds, backed 
by ten thousand Yorkshire yeomen, could afford to laugh at 
the sergeant and his mace; and the demand that the Com- 
mons should be sent back to their constituents as unfaithful 
stewards was soon enforced by one whose person, even when 
he stood alone, was as sacred as that of royalty itself. Lord 
Chatham, in seeking emancipation from office, had obeyed one 
of those intuitive and irrepressible impulses which advise bet- 
ter than the most experienced phj^sician. Within three weeks 
after he had sent back the privy seal, the gout came to his 
rescue in a series of attacks violent and frequent in propor- 
tion to the evil for wliieli it was the long-expected remedy. 
It left him at last, happy, hopeful, and serene ; young, with 
the imperishable youth of genius, as when he broke his first 
lance by the side of Pulteney ; his ambition satiated, but 
his patriotism more ardent and more enlightened than ever. 
Chastened by suffering, and taught by his own errors, he was 
an humbler but a far nobler man than during the period when 
his immense success, too recent even for him to bear wisely, 
had made him wilful, captions, and exacting. In different 
quarters, and with very different feelings, it was recognized 
that he was no longer the Chatham of 1765. The first use 
which he made of his recovered faculties was to appear at 
St. James's, where the king learned, in the course of twenty 
minutes' conversation, that the most punctiliously loyal of his 
subjects was no longer the most obsequious. George the 
Third could scarcely believe his ears when a statesman who 
had hitherto approached him with a subservience wliich would 
have been almost too pronounced for his royal brother of 
France told him plainly that his Majesty had been badly 



190 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

counselled in the matter of the Middlesex election, and beg- 
ged that justice might be done to his own disinterestedness 
in case he should find himself bound in conscience to oppose 
the ministerial measures. 

Disinterested indeed must have been the aims of one to 
Avhom a place was a torment, and who had drunk so deep of 
glory that he had no relish for those periodical displays which 
sweeten the labors of opposition to vainer and slighter men. 
A fine speech could add nothing to his fame. A successful 
division would only surround him with importunate partisans, 
supplicating him, for their sake, and for the sake of the coun- 
tr}^, to tear himself from all that he prized — from the peace- 
ful joys of a married life, the story of wdiich reads like an 
idyl ; from the children in whose sports he renewed his boy- 
hood, and a share of whose studies sufficed his not very rapa- 
cious appetite for printed literature ; from his planting, his 
riding, his long lazy excursions in search of the picturescpie ; 
from his "farmer's chimney-corner," the smoke of which 
might be seen from the Vale of Taunton, and his sunnncr re- 
treat in that lovely nook on the south coast where Devonshire 
marches with Dorsetshire.' Hope 'of advantage or aggrandize- 

1 Wilkes called Chatham the worst letter-writer of the age; which, 
though a terrible charge in the eyes of Gillj^ Williams and George Sel- 
wyn, would be regarded with indifference by one who lived a little too 
consciously in the spirit of Themistocles, and did not care how destitute 
he might be of lighter accomplishments, if only he knew how to make a 
small state a great empire. There is, however, something attractive in 
Chatham's domestic correspondence, marked, as it is, by stateliness of 
manner contrasting most quaintly with extreme simplicity of idea. Noth- 
ing can be prettier than his letters to his wife from Lyme Regis, where 
he was looking after the health of his younger, and the military studies 
of his elder, son. ''We returned late," he writes, "from the morning's 
ride, as the all-exploring eye of taste, and William's ardor, led us some- 
what beyond our intentions. My epistle, therefore, being after dinner, 
eaten Avith the hunger of an American ranger, will be the shorter, and I 
fear the duller. It is a delight to see William see nature in her free and 
wild compositions ; and 1 tell myself, as we go, that the general mother is 
not ashamed of her child. The j)articular loved mother of our promising 
tribe has sent the sweetest and most encouraging of letters to the young 
Vauban. His assiduous application to his profession did not allow him 



17GS-G0.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 191 

mcnt for himself he no longer entertained; "but without 
hope," as he r|uietlj said, " there is a thing called duty." The 
motive that brought Chatham back into public life was the 
highest and purest of those which impel to action ; and puri- 
ty of motive produced, as it ever will produce, magnanimity 
of conduct. lie wdio, when engaged in fighting his own bat- 
tle, had never troubled himself to propitiate a foe or to court 
an ally betook himself, now that his views were no longer 
personal, to the work of forming and consolidating a party 
with as much industry as a young politician who has just be- 
gun to see his way into the cabinet. Determined that it 
should not be his fault if the nation remained in the slough 
where it then was struggling, and discerning the hurricane 
that was brewing beyond, the seas with a glance wdiich seldom 
deceived him when it swept a sufficiently wide horizon, he 
girded himself to the effort of withstanding those enemies of 
England who called themselves her servants, but who were 
more dangerous to her welfare than the rulers and warriors 
of France whom he had so often foiled and humiliated. Con- 
scious that his one poor chance of victory in such an unequal 
conflict depended upon his first having conquered himself, he 
laid aside the haughtiness which was his besetting fault, and 
the affectation that was his favorite weakness, and made it a 
duty to practise a consideration for others which hitherto had 
been sadly wanting. He sought and obtained a reconciliation 
in form Math Lord Temple, who had deserted him, and with 
George Grenville, who had sold him ; and, having performed 
the easier task of pardoning those by whom he had been in- 
jured, he turned to others who, as against himself, had not a 
little to forgive. Doing what he might to atone for the chief, 
and now irreparable, mistake in his career, he made frank and 

to accompany us. He was generously occupied in learning to dcfencl 
the happy land we were enjoying. Indeed, my life, the promise of our 
dear children does me more good than the purest of pure air." Lord 
Chatham's anticipations came true at least as often as those of most fa- 
thers; but William was destined to have as little leisure for contemplat- 
ing the natural beauties of his native land as his brother was successful 
in fighting; for it. 



192 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. V. 

almost humble advances to a group of statesmen who lield his 
opinions, and who were imbued with principles as elevated as 
his own. Those advances were accepted with a hesitation 
which it is impossible to blame. It was not in human nature 
that the Rockinghams should forget who it was that had lent 
the majesty of his name to excuse and dignify the conspiracy 
which overthrew them. So cruel a wound could not heal at 
the first intention. What had taken him again to court, asked 
Burke, except that he might talk some " pompous, creeping, 
ambiguous matter in the true Chathamic style ?" But Chat- 
ham had done, then and forever, with bombast and mystery. 
Plainly and shortly he told every one w^hom he met what his 
policy was to be — tenderness towards the American colonists ; 
justice to the Middlesex electors. This policy he hoped to be 
permitted to pursue in company with those who had already 
made it their own, and to whom, if success crowned their com- 
mon endeavors, he should cheerfully hand over the spoils of 
victory. " For my part," he said, "I am grown old, and un- 
able to fill any office of business ; but this I am resolved on, 
that I will not even sit at council but to meet Lord Rocking- 
ham. He, and he alone, has a knot of spotless friends such 
as ought to govern this kingdom." That was the spirit in 
which the greatest of Eno-land's statesmen went forth to the 
last and the most honorable of his labors. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 193 



CHAPTER VL 

17T0. 

The Effect produced upon the Political World by the Rccappcfirance of 
Lord Chatham. — His Speech upon the Address. — Camden and Grauby 
separate themselves from their Colleagues. — Savile rebvdces the House 
of Commons. — Charles Yorke and the Great Seal. — The Duke of Graf- 
ton resigns. — David Hume. — Lord North goes to the Treasury. — 
George the Tliird, his Ministers and his Policy. — George Greuville on 
Election Petitions and the Civil List. — Chatham denounces the Cor- 
ruption of Parliament. — Sj^mptoms of Popular Discontent. — The City's 
Remonstrance presented to the King and condemned by Parliament. — 
Imminent Danger of a Collision between the Nation and its Rulers. — 
The Letter to the King. — Horace Walpole on the Situation. — The Per- 
sonal Character of Wilkes, and its Influence upon the History of the 
Country. — Wilkes regains his Liberty. — His Subsequent Career, and the 
Final Solution of the Controversy about the Middlesex Election. 

Even Chatham's love of a stage effect must have been grat- 
ified to the full by the commotion which his political ]-esnr- 
rection excited. Nothing resembling it can be quoted from 
parliamentary history ; though the tlieatre supplies a suffi- 
ciently close parallel in the situation where Lucio, in " Meas- 
ure for Measure," pulls aside the cowl of the friar and dis- 
closes the features of the ruler who has returned at the mo- 
ment when lie is least expected to call his deputy to account 
for the evil deeds that had been done in his name. Grafton, 
the Angelo of the piece, accepted his fate as submissively and 
almost as promptly as his dramatic prototype. Still loyal at 
heart to the great man whose authority he had abused, or 
rather permitted others to abuse, he was dumfounded when 
Chatham, emerging from the royal closet, met his greeting 
with the frigid politeness of a redoubted swordsman who sa- 
lutes before a mortal duel. The unfortunate prime-minister 
knew that he had sinned too conspicuously to be forgiven, and 
envied in his heart those less prominent members of his own 

13 



191 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

government who could meet their old lord and master in the 
confidence tliat he would not be too hard on the political 
frailties of such humble personages as a lord chancellor or a 
commander-in-chief of the forces. Every one who had served 
under Chatham was as restless as an Austerlitz veteran who 
had just heard of the landing from Elba. Granbj, the English 
Murat, could hardly be kept from at once resigning his im- 
mense appointments, rendered necessary to him by a profuse 
and ill-ordered generosity which would have been a blot on 
any character but that of a brave, an uncultured, and an unas- 
suming soldier. Lord Camden, who so little approved the pol- 
icy of his colleagues that he absented himself from the cabi- 
net whenever the business on hand related to the coercion of 
America or the suppression of Wilkes, and who for two years 
past had never opened his mouth in the House of Peers ex- 
cept to put the question from the woolsack, viewed the reap- 
pearance of Chatham as a tacit but irresistible appeal to a 
friendship which from his school-days onwards had been the 
ornament and delight of his life and the mainstay of his pro- 
fessional advancement. 

And yet, though all that was best in the ministry already 
hankered to be out of it, the Bedfords had still fair ground 
for hoping that a crisis might be averted. Horribly frightened 
(to use Burke's energetic metaphor) lest the table they had so 
well covered and at w^hich they liad sat down with so good an 
appetite should be kicked over in the scuffle, they still could 
not bring themselves to believe that Chatham would adopt the 
cause of the Middlesex electors. For when during the first 
months of the late government Wilkes applied to the secretary 
of state for permission to live unmolested in England, the Duke 
of Grafton, clever in small things, had contrived to shift the 
odium of a refusal from himself to the prime-minister. Tlie 
unhappy exile stole back to France, persuaded that he had a 
vindictive personal enemy in Lord Chatham, wdio, as a mat- 
ter of fact, had never been informed of his petition, and who, 
if he thought about him at all, regarded him as a cosmopoli- 
tan able and willing to make himself at home in a country 
where claret was and sheriff's officers were not. In the an- 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 195 

guisli of his disappointment Wilkes attacked his fancied op- 
pressor with an audacions and observant bitterness, admirably 
calculated to wound a man whom just then none dared to as- 
sail except with remonstrances against his overweening pride 
and predominating power, which were compliments more to 
the taste of their object than so many set panegyrics. The 
Bedfords, in January, 1768, had been chuckling over the nov- 
el sensation which Chatham must have experienced at iinding 
himself described, in a pamphlet that sold like wildfire, as the 
warming-pan for Lord Bute, as the first comedian of the age, 
as so puffed up by the idea of his own importance that he was 
blind to the superior merit of a brother-in-law with whom he 
was on the worst of terms;' and the motives which in Janu- 
ary, 1770, induced the great earl to stand forth in defence of 
one who had never written so ingeniously as when he was 
trying to hurt the feelings of his advocate were altogether 
outside the range of their comprehension. To forgive those 
who had something to give, and to forget where anything was 
to be got, was a form of magnanimity to which they them- 
selves were at all times equal ; but not even Sandwich, writ- 
ing confidentially to Weymouth, would have suggested that 
Chatham had any longer an eye to ofiice. They accounted for 
bis conduct after the fashion of their tribe. When it began to 
dawn upon them that a statesman who, if he played a selfish 
game, might have been in power for the rest of his natural 
life, deliberately preferred, at the bidding of his conscience, to 
brave the anger of a sovereign whom he adored on behalf of 
a penniless adventurer who had libelled him, they gratified 
their malice and preserved inviolate their theory of the 
springs of human action by sj^reading a report that the most 

' " A proud, insolent, overbearing, ambitious man is always full of the 
ideas of his own importance, and vainly imagines himself superior to the 
equality necessary among real friends. Lord Chatham declared in Par- 
liament the strongest attachment to Lord Temple, one of the greatest 
characters our country can boast, and said he would live and die with his 
noble brother. He has received obligations of the iirst magnitude from 
that noble brother; yet what trace of gratitude was ever found in any 
part of his conduct ?" 



106 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

impassioned of speakers liacl at last liarangned himself out of 
his senses. As, one after another, resolutions were laid on the 
table of the House of Lords expounding in correct yet stirring 
plirases the principles of freedom and justice for which, time 
out of mind, all Englishmen worthy of the name had striven ; 
and as each successive declaration of public right was enforced 
by outbursts of majestic eloquence which have had the rare 
fortune to obtain a place in the familiar literature of a nation 
that ordinarily dwells but little upon the oratory of the past ;^ 
liigby and his fellows hardened themselves against the voice 
of reason and the disapprobation of posterity by reminding 
each other that they had only to do with another " mad mo- 
tion of the mad Earl of Chatham." 

Till Parliament met (and the ministry, anxious to postpone 
the evil liour, took tlie unusual course of dispensing with a 
winter session). Lord Chatham, said Burke, kept hovering in 
the air, waiting to souse down upon his prey. And, indeed, 
nothing short of an Homeric simile could depict the panic and 
the scurry which ensued upon the first swoop of the eagle 
whose beak and talons were henceforward to be exercised on 
a new hunting-field. For the House of Lords had never really 
heard Chatham. During the short period that he sat there as 
prime-minister he had not been himself either in body or in 
intellect. With breaking health and a bad cause, he had been 
confronted not unsuccessfully by men who were armed for 
the unequal combat with no weapon except the knowledge 
that they were in the right. When, borrowing the jargon 
which was fashionable at the palace, he declaimed against the 
most modest and long-suffering set of statesmen that ever did 
the king's business as " the proudest connection in the coun- 
try," he had been plainly told by the Duke of Eichmond that 
the nobility would not be browbeaten by an insolent minister. 



' Any one who has been behind the scenes during the preparations for 
speech-day at a public school knows that though a well-read master may 
insist on an extract from Canning or Grattan, a boy, if left to himself, will 
choose something of Chatham's, and in most cases something which 
Chatham spoke in the spring of 1770. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 197 

But no one ventured to rebuke him now. On the afternoon 
of the ninth of January, the first of tlie session of ITTO, when 
the king had read his speech and had returned to St. James's, 
the Lords were invited humbly to assure his Majesty that they 
would dutifully assist him in doing as much mischief in either 
hemisphere as in his wisdom he thought advisable. As soon 
as the noble seconder had stammered through his last sen- 
tence, Chatham rose to his feet and informed the members of 
the government that he was, and had the best of reasons to 
be, as loyal as any of them, and that he should give substan- 
tial evidence of his loyalty by telling the truth to his royal 
master. And then, after a few sentences of good-will towards 
his fellow-subjects in America, which Americans still quote 
with gratitude, he discoursed briefly and calmly of the ques- 
tion of the day, and concluded by calling on the Peers to in- 
form the mind of their sovereign, and pacify the just irritation 
of his people, by declaring that the House of Commons, in 
proceeding of its own authority to incapacitate Wilkes from 
serving in Parliament, had usurped a power which belonged 
to all the three branches of the legislature.' He had never 
spoken more quietly or with more instant and visible results. 
As he resumed his seat Lord Camden started up, displaying in 
word and gesture the emotion of one in whom a long and 
painful mental struggle had been brought to a sudden end by 

' The best point in Chatham's first speech on this occasion was his al- 
lusion to the retribution which eventually befell the nobles of Castile, 
who had been cajoled by Charles the Fifth into helping him to corrupt 
the popular element in the Cortes ; and its literary interest is derived 
from his admiring mention of Dr. Robertson, whose style was just then 
the delight of all British readers, and whose profits were the envy of 
most Southern authors. " I cannot help thinldng," said Walpole, " that 
there is a great deal of Scotch pufl^ng and partiality, when the booksell- 
ers have given the doctor three thousand pounds for his ' Life of Charles 
the Fifth,' for composing which he does not pretend to have obtained 
any new materials." Walpole had justification for his criticism ; but such 
is the charm of a clear narrative by a writer who, without being dishon- 
est, can make the most of what he knows that Robertson's work will 
probably survive the productions of the industrious and very able schol- 
ars who have followed him over the same ground. 



198 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

a flash of conviction. He had accepted the great seal, he said, 
without conditions, fully intending never to be led into courses 
which he could not approve ; but experience taught him that 
he had overrated his own independence. Often had he hung 
his head in council, and showed in his countenance a dissent 
which it would have been useless to express in words ; but the 
time had come when he must speak out, and proclaim to the 
world that his opinions were those of the great man whose 
presence had again breathed life into the State ; and that if in 
his character of a judge he were to pay any respect to this un- 
constitutional and illegal vote of the House of Commons, he 
should look upon himself as a traitor to his trust and an 
enemy to his country. 

The thunder-stroke of such a confession, from the keeper 
of the royal conscience, could not be parried by the hackneyed 
tricks of the parliamentar}^ fencing-school. Lord Mansfield, 
whom it never took much to disconcert, began by informing 
his audience that his sentiments on the legality of the pro- 
ceedings of the House of Commons were locked up within 
his own breast, and should die with him ; and what he said 
afterwards did little to remove the bewildering impression 
which had been produced by this extraordinary preface. He 
was followed by Chatham, who, even in the more strictly kept 
lists of the Commons, had always treated the forms of the 
House as made for anybody but himself, and who positively 
revelled in the license of the Lords. In a second speech, 
which his hearers were at liberty to call a reply if they could 
forget that, according to every rule of debate, he was forbid- 
den to make one, he invoked the highest traditions of our 
national liberty against the many-headed tyranny of an nn- 
scrupulous senate, and electrified friend and foe alike by an 
appeal to Magna Charta, wdiich, as a strake of the genius that 
is above and outside art, ranks with the oath that Demosthe- 
nes swore by the dead of Marathon. It was all in vain that 
the Peers, not flattered by being called silken barons, declined 
by an overwhelming majority to imitate their ancestors at 
Eunnymede. It was all in vain that Sandwich defied the 
Opposition to make any sense out of the rhetoric that they 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 199 

had been applaudini^. Chatliam, wliosc speaking was a sort 
of inspired conversation which affected ever^^ one who was 
present as if it had been addressed especially to himself, had 
been perfectly well understood both in the House and under 
the gallery. While, more than any other orator, he gained by 
being heard, there was always something to take away which 
would bear the carriage. In as short a time as was required 
for an eager partisan, primed with news, to cross the lobby, it 
was known in the Commons that Pitt had made a speech for 
Wilkes surpassing anything that he had done since the night 
when he answered Grenville about the repeal of the Stamp 
Act; and the fragments of his eloquence, which were soon 
ffoino- the round of the benches, stirred his old followers like 
the peal of a distant trumpet. Granby, who always argued 
as if he were under fire, informed the House, in half a dozen 
short and plain sentences, that he now saw the Middlesex elec- 
tion in its true light, and that he should lament the part he 
had taken in seating Luttrell as the greatest misfortune of his 
life. Sir George Savile, picking his phrases with delibera- 
tion, declared that the vote for expelling Wilkes, which he 
characterized as the beginning of sorrows, w^as the offspring of 
corruption, and told the majority, in so many words, that they 
had betrayed their constituents. Lord Xorth, who knew the 
force of such an accusation from the mouth of one who has 
been cited by historians as the model of what a great country 
gentleman should be, and whose name contemporary satirists 
employed as a synonym for probity, took occasion on the next 
day to express his assurance that Sir George had spoken in 
warmth. " No," said Savile ; " I spoke what I thought last 
nio'ht, and I think the same this morning. Honorable mem- 
bers have betrayed their trust. I will add no epithets, be- 
cause epithets only weaken. I will not say they have be- 
trayed their country corruptly, flagitiously, and scandalously ; 
but I do say that they have betrayed their countrj^, and I 
stand here to receive the punishment for having said so." 
Some young and foolish members, among whom it is needless 
to say that Charles Fox was conspicuous, talked loudly about 
the scandal of condoning so pointed an insult to their august 



200 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

assembly; but their elders judged it wiser to do by the affront 
as they had done by the Treasury bank-bills which had earned 
it for them. It was understood that if Savile were sent to the 
Tower, his friends would insist on going with him ; and the 
ministers, who had quite enough trouble with a single martyr 
to liberty on their hands, could easily anticipate the sort of 
life which they would lead with the Cavendishes on one side 
of the prison doors, and the Yorkshire freeholders on the 
other. 

Granby was entreated by his colleagues to remain in office; 
but he knew them better than to constitute them the judges 
of what his honor demanded. On the sixteenth of January, 
a week after he had made a clean breast of it in the House of 
Commons, he threw up the command of the army and the 
mastership of the ordnance, and went into poverty, as he had 
so often gone into the throat of death, determined that, come 
what might, Pitt should never say that he had flinched from 
his duty. No attempt was made to retain Lord Camden. 
The Court had never forgiven him his celebrated decision 
against the legality of general warrants. Prerogative kings, 
it has been well said, are the making of constitutional lawyers ;' 
and George the Third had long chafed against the necessity 
of keeping about his person, in the place of honor, the earliest 
and most successful specimen of his own manufacture. But 
to dismiss the only judge who, as a judge, had acquired a 
European reputation — whom foreigners, after they had heard 
Pitt at Westminster and Garrick at Drury Lane, used to be 
taken to see in the Court of Common Pleas as the third 
wonder of England — and to dismiss him without having 
secured in his place a lawyer of high distinction and respecta- 
ble character, would have been to strike the last prop from 
beneath the tottering administration. So Grafton was well 
aware; but his adversaries had discerned more quickly than 
himself where the key of the situation la3^ On the very night 



^ This remark is made by Lord Albemarle in his " Memoirs of Rock- 
ingham," a mine of Whig tradition, admirably worked according to the 
good old Whig processes. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 201 

that Lord Camden liad performed Ins memorable act of mu- 
tiny, Lord Tem])le aiul Lord Shelburnc had been prompt to 
testify their admiration of his conduct in terms carefully 
framed for the purpose of gibbeting by anticipation his suc- 
cessor. In the teeth of their withering denunciation, the most 
eminent men at the bar and on tlie bench refused even to be 
tempted by the great prize of their profession. Donning, 
wliom Chatham, always on the search for merit, had made 
solicitor-general, and who was true to his patron in opinions 
and in affection, could not think of accepting an offer which, 
according to Chatham's brother-in-law, would be rejected by 
anybody but an obsequious hireling, and, according to Chat- 
ham's political aide-de-camp, would have no charms except for 
a wretch more base and mean-spirited than could be found in 
the kingdom. Sir Eardley Wilmot, the Chief-justice of the 
Common Pleas, was earnestly and frequently pressed to take 
the great seal into his custody, with any rank in the peerage 
or slice off the pension-list that he cared to name. But that 
simple and sincere man, who w\as a lawyer as Reynolds was 
an artist or Brindley an engineer, preferred the regular and 
solid work of his calling to the ambition of making, and the 
annoyance of enduring, party speeches in the Plouse of Lords 
until a change of government should condemn him, according 
to his own vigorous expression, to live thenceforward on the 
public like an almsman. It was hardly w^orth while to go 
through the form of begging Lord Mansfield to be chancellor. 
He was too intelligent and too timid to be dazzled by the at- 
tractions of an office which would add nothing to his author- 
ity, and would lay him under the obligation of defending 
every folly of Grafton and every job of Sandwich against 
Camden with his hands untied, and Chatham with his brain 
unclouded. 

There only remained a single member of the profession 
who, as a candidate for the chancellorship, could be mention- 
ed in the same day with Mansfield, Wilmot, and Dunning. 
Charles Yorke had been in office with the Eockinghams, and, 
-when their government fell, they were proud at being accom- 
panied into opposition by one who would have been an orna- 



202 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

meiit to any party. Grafton, whose short political life — for 
he was still but four-and-thirty — had coincided with a period 
during which mutual treachery and disloyalty among puLlic 
men were preached as a gospel by the Court, and who had been 
accustomed to expect any politician to change sides after a 
month's coquetry, and any lawyer on a moment's notice, saw 
no reason why he should not offer Yorke the great seal as 
freely and as openly as to his own attorney-general. But he 
forgot that the man whom he counted on buying as Bute had 
bought Henry Fox, or as he himself had bought the Bedfords, 
was one of a group of statesmen who, after a long and shame- 
ful interval, had once more introduced into the relations of 
parliamentary life that stanch and chivalrous fidelity which 
is now the common quality of both our great national parties. 
Richmond and Portland and the Keppels had tasted the 
pleasures of personal intimacy, enhanced by an identity of 
political views and a brotherhood in political fortunes ; and 
they were surprised and indignant when they were informed 
of Grafton's overtures, and deeply hurt when they detected 
indications that the proposal had not been without its effect. 
They clearly gave Yorke to understand that he must choose 
between the proffered dignity and their friendship ; and such 
was the binding power of old and familiar ties, which it re- 
quired a stronger and coarser hand than his to snap at the 
first effort, that, with a heart fluttering between scruples and 
desires, he mustered courage enough to go back to the Duke 
of Grafton with a refusal. The duke sent him on to the 
palace, where the unhappy man was so overcome by his per- 
plexity and distress, which were evidently preying on his 
health, that the king bade him give the matter np and set his 
mind at ease, as, after Avhat he had said to excuse himself, it 
would be cruel to press him. 

Cruel indeed it was. Lord Ilardwicke, throughout the 
wretched business, played a true brother's part, trying, by 
every means at his command, to make the waverer see his 
duty ; while at the same time he sturdily, and almost angrily, 
insisted that Eockingham, and Rockingham's friends, should 
set the most favorable construction upon their old colleague's 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 203 

vacillation.* Seriously alarmed by the little that Yorke, op- 
jiressed by an unnatural and uneasy reserve, which in a sensi- 
tive man is the worst of symptoms, could be got to tell him 
about his interview with the king, Ilardwicke declined to 
leave him until, with fraternal courage, he had secured from 
him a promise that he would take a good dose of physic and 
spend the next day quietly at home. 

But, before many hours had passed, the fish was again at the 
bait. Yorke's character and circumstances conspired to ren- 
der the temptation irresistible. With brilliant abilities and 
all the reflected advantages of the great Lord Hard wick e's 
high station and unstained renown, he began life possessed of 
every good thing that could be inherited except the stout 
heart which had brought his father from an attorney's drudge 
to be the most prosperous, if not the most famous, of chancel- 
lors. A successful author, according to the taste of his day, 
while yet a boy,^ and in large practice at the bar while still a 

' On the one Land, Lord Hardwicke insisted with Yorke that, before 
joining the government, he should see his way very clear (which he cer- 
tainly could not) towards conscientiously adopting the Court view of the 
American difficulty and the Middlesex election. On the other hand, iu 
his letters to Lord Rockingham, he made the best of his brother's hesita- 
tion, and the most of his sacrifices. " I thank you for your communica- 
tion," he writes on Monday, the fifteenth of January, while Yorke's de- 
cision was in abeyance. " I see the times are running into great violences, 
and, if so, honest men must act according to their consciences. Your 
lordshij) will know to-morrow the resolution taken in the great aftair. I 
know not what ' kennel ' j^ou allude to. I think all parties are getting 
deeper into the dirt." On the evening of the same day he says, " I am 
authorized by my brother to acquaint you that he has finally declined 
the seals. How far he has judged right or wrong will only be knowm by 
the consequences. I may fairly say that he, as well as his near relations, 
have been victims to the violence of party and their own moderation." 

^ The young Earl of Hardwicke and Charles Yorke wrote between them 
" The Athenian Letters," a work not inferior in merit to the l)est of those 
pseudo-classical productions which unite the dulness of a political me- 
moir to the afi"ectations and inaccuracies of an historical novel, and which 
leave on the palate a sickly taste that is perhaps the most disagreeable 
of all literary sensations. It is difficult to imagine how any human be- 
ing who could read a translation of Thucydides should sit down to two 



201 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

minor, Yorke entered Parliament at four-and-twenty, amidst 
the universal welcome of an assembly which confidently hoped 
to have reason for acknowledging 

"How sharp the spur of worthy ancestry 
When kindred virtues fan the generous mind 
Of Somers' nephew and of Ilardwiclve's son." 

Unfortunately his was not one of those rare natures which 
can be petted by the world without being spoiled. lie did 
not idle ; he did not lose his balance ; he deserved all that he 
got, and went the right way to get it : but his idea of his own 
merits was so extravagant that he never heartily enjoyed a 
success, and took the inevitable disappointments of West- 
minster Hall and the House of Commons as so many personal 
insults on the part of destiny. He thought it a grievance 
that he was not a judge at thirty, and induced his friends to 
think so too. He murmured at being nothing more than so- 
licitor-general at thirtj'-three. His chagrin when Pratt, much 
his senior, and indubitably his. superior, was made attorney- 
general over his head in the summer of 1T5T was too deep 
for words; and the feeling rankled until, after the lapse of 
many years, it found vent in the act which was his destruc- 
tion. But it was after the fall of the Rockingham adminis- 
tration that his egotism was seen in the most unpleasing re- 
lief as against the patriotism of better men. While Savile 
and Burke were planning what they could do for the country, 
Yorke was forever brooding over what he might have done 
for himself. Politicians out of ofliee, who work hard for 
nothing, are always inclined mildly to wonder at the em- 
phasis with which a thriving barrister accuses the ill-luck that 
condemns him to sit on the shady side of the House of Com- 
mons; but Yorke altogether overstei3ped the conceded limits 
of professional grumbling. Endowed with an ample share of 
his father's fortune ; happily married ; the heir-j^resumptive 
to an earldom ; dividing with Horace Walpole the empire of 
polite letters, and with Wedderburn the most lucrative and 

volumes of the correspondence of the agent to the King of Persia, sup- 
posed to be resident at Athens during the Peloponuesiau war. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 205 

interesting business of tlie law-courts — lie lived on brambles 
as long as somebody else was lord chancellor. The corre- 
spondence which he maintained with foreigners of talent and 
distinction carried his sorrows far and wide through Europe 
in quest of sympathy. Lord Campbell has printed the well- 
turned phrases in which Stanislaus Augustus, writing from 
"Warsaw, delicately reminded Charles Yorke that it was too 
much to expect a King of Poland to pity anybody, and least 
of all a man who could command, and was framed to appre- 
ciate, a life of dignified and cultured ease. But dignified and 
cultured ease seemed purgatory, or worse, in the eyes of one 
who was perpetually tortui'ed by the feeling that, unless he 
could reach the pinnacle which fortune had hitherto made in- 
accessible to him, liis career would have been nothing better 
than a long succes d'estime. Though he had started half-way 
up the hill, things had so turned out that the paths which led 
to the summit had successively been closed to him, until one 
remained open, and one only. As long as Camden stayed in 
the government, Yorke was chancellor designate of the Oppo- 
sition ; and a change of administration, which was always pos- 
sible and now seemed imminent, would put him in secure pos- 
session of the great seal. But the scene of the ninth of Jan- 
uary in the Lords had destroyed his solitary chance. AYhigs 
and Wilkites had now a hero in Camden, for whom no praise 
could be too warm, and, when the day of triumph arrived, no 
reward could be too splendid. If the Kockinghams came in 
on the question of the Middlesex election, their chancellor 
must be the statesman whose fame as a judge was identified 
with the earliest, and, as a political martyr, with the latest, 
phase of the endless controversy, and who was in the inti- 
mate confidence and under the special protection of the great 
orator without whose hearty assistance they could not retain 
power for a fortnight.' 
1/ And so, with thirteen years less of life and hope before him, 
Charles Yorke found himself once again postponed to his an- 

' It is quite clear from Lord Hardwicke's letters that the Yorkes be- 
lieved that, iu case of a change of government, the selection of a chancel- 
lor would lie with Chatham, and that he would choose Camden. 



206 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

cient rival. Camden, after making liis market by conforming 
to the Court, was now at the eleventh hour to be richly recom- 
pensed for his tardy independence, while he himself was left 
to the reflection, so cruel to a wordly-minded man, that he had 
been disinterested gratis. The strain was too much for his 
constancy. After a broken night, leaving his medicine un- 
tasted on the table, he went of his own accord to the levee. 
His appearance there at such a time could have only one 
meaning. The king, who saw that he wanted to have his 
hands forced, drew him into the closet, and, dropping the tone 
of the previous evening, told him that he must never look to 
be forgiven if he failed his sovereign in such a ph'ght. He 
himself (he declared) had been unable to sleep from vexation 
at the thouo-ht of Yorke's havins; declined to rescue him from 
a " degrading thraldom" — the thraldom of submitting to see 
America saved and England pacified by statesmen who Avere 
his own devoted servants and Yorke's loving friends. Such 
was the reasoning which persuaded the unhappy man to set 
at naught the claims of what in any other company he would 
have called duty and honor; but few have the presence of 
mind to scrutinize the language of entreaty when a monarch 
condescends to plead. Yorke consented to be chancellor. 
The seal was taken from Lord Camden, who that night, for 
the first time during many months, enjoyed the sweet and 
tranquil sleep that was never to revisit his successor. He re- 
tired, not as other chancellors, loaded with multifarious spoils, 
but far nearer poverty than he had been since the days when 
he rode the barren round of the AVestern circuit, a briefless 
and rather hopeless barrister, mounting himself sorrily out of 
the proceeds of his college fellowship. His son, who inherit- 
ed much of his capacity and all his public spirit, never could 
recover for the family the favor of their sovereign. When 
the second Lord Camden was invested with the Garter, in token 
of eminent services which he made it his pride not to permit 
the country to overpay, the courtiers noticed that George the 
Third performed his part in the ceremony with an ungracious 
reluctance which indicated that forty years had not obliterated 
the memories of the great crisis of January, 1770. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 207 

Having yielded to the flattering violence wliieli he had wan- 
tonly courted, Yorke left the palace undone. The Jane Shore 
of politics, his frailty aroused no harsher sentiment than com- 
passion in those who, men themselves, could make allowance 
for his feminine nature. But the consternation Avith which 
Lord Hardwicke, who had spent the morning, by his express 
desire, in telling everybody that he had declined the seal, re- 
ceived the announcement that he had accepted it, did more 
than could have been done by the most poignant reproaches 
to disclose to him the aspect which his conduct must present 
to all whose good opinion he treasured. lie foresaw what 
Barre would say, what Burke would write, and what Savile 
would feel, when a brother who had always evinced a more 
than fraternal interest in his career, and who was conversant 
enongh with established proprieties to know the gravity of 
the advice that he was giving, adjured him to return forth- 
with to St. James's and entreat his Majesty to release him 
from an engagement which he ought never to have under- 
taken. But such an effort w\as far beyond Charles Yorke's 
courage. He could not, he said, retract. His honor was con- 
cerned. He had given his word, and the king had wished 
him joy. Forbearing to remind him that, according to the 
law of honor, promises rank by their priority in time, and not 
by the station of those to whom they have been made. Lord 
Hardwicke, now that the step was irrevocable, did his best to 
raise his brother's spirits and calm his increasing agitation. 
But a hearty quarrel would have been less terrible to Charles 
Yorke than the tenderness and assiduity by which the mem- 
bers of a family whose idol he had alwa^-s been endeavored 
to conceal from him that he had changed their pride to shame. 
It was useless to appeal from his true friends to his new con- 
federates in search of the admiring and unquestioning affec- 
tion without which life was unendurable to him. Grafton 
sympathized with him as an unlucky climber who is sliding 
over a precipice sympathizes with the last piece of turf at 
which he clutches. The Bedfords applauded him as the one 
wise fellow among a party of saints and fools, and were in- 
clined to envy him the facility of his ghastly triumph. To 



208 THE EARLY HISTORY OF fCnAr. VI. 

Lord Holland bis fate was only the matter for a heartless jest, 
and a text for one of his heart-felt but selfish sermons on his 
own sorrows.' 

The protracted agony of the struggle had thrown Charles 
Yorke into a high fever, both of mind and body. Mr. John 
Yorke, who, though able and cultivated, and in Parliament as 
a thing of course, had sunk his own ambition in order to push 
the success of a brother whom he worshipped, took turns with 
Lord Ilardwicke in keeping the sufferer company. Touched 
by his kindness, and encouraged by the recollection of his 
life-long devotion, the chancellor proposed to him to follow 
his own examj^le and accept an office in the Admiralty. John 
Yorke gently put aside tlie offer ; but no delicacy could dis- 
guise the motives of his refusal, and Charles, whose melan- 
choly had been lightened by a gleam of hope, said gloomily 
that since his brother threw him over he was a ruined man. 
From that instant he turned his face to the wall. "Wednesday, 
the seventeenth of January, was the day on which he grasped 
the prize that crowned the labors, the struggles, and the in- 
trigues of a lifetime. On Friday he took to his bed, and by 
the evening his family had reasons for dreading the worst, 
whatever those reasons were.^ When he was asked whether 



^ " I never envied Mr. Yorke while he lived," ■wrote Lord Holland to 
George Selwyn ; " but I must take leave to envy him, and everybody else, 
when they are dead. I comfort by persuading myself it is happier to wish 
for death than to dread it; and I believe everybody of my age does one 
or the other. But I do not fiftd myself near a natural death, nor will you 
see me hanged, though I verily think they will never leave oif abusing 
me." " Yorke," he says at a subsequent date, " was very ugly while he 
lived. How did he look when he was dead ?" Most of these letters of 
Lord Holland contain an allusion to the morbid fondness for death, es- 
pecially in its more sensational forms, by which Selwyn is now chiefly re- 
membered. His interest in dead men and his indifference to living women 
were inexhaustible topics for the audacious raillery of his cronies. 

^"I can only tell your lordship," wrote Lord Hardwicke to Lord 
Rockingham on the Friday, " tliat my dear and unhappy brother is 
much worse, and that I tremble for the event. God send me and his 
family strength enough to bear against this too probable calamity. I 
abominate the Court politics, and almost those of every sort. My jwor 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 209 

the great seal, wliicli lay in his chamber, should be affixed to 
the patent of his new peerage, he collected himself enough to 
express a hope that he was no longer guardian of the bauble 
which eight-and-fort}^ hours before he had bought at such a 
price. On the Saturday morning an apparent change in his 
condition slightly i-eassured his friends ; but he did not sur- 
vive the week. Into the precise manner of his death history, 
which has been deservedly indulgent to him, has forborne 
curiously to inquire. It is enough that he could not endure 
the shame of having stooped to that which for two genera- 
tions after him was done with unabashed front by some of the 
most celebrated statesmen whose names are inscribed on the 
roll of our chancellors. 

Nothing was now left for the Duke of Grafton but to get 
himself out of the way before Junius had time to point the 
moral of the tragedy. It was impossible for him to continue 
prime-minister after the most ambitious lawyer at the bar had 
thought death a less evil than the disgrace of being his chan- 
cellor. The government, which, like a snowball, had been 
changing its composition as it was kicked along, was now dis- 
solving fast beneath the breath of Chatham. Seven places 
were already vacant ; and now Conw^ay, who had of late been 
acting as an unpaid member of the cabinet, intimated that 
though he had been willing to attend as long as he sat be- 
tween Camden and Granby, he would not undertake to pro- 
vide respectability for the whole administration. Lord Wey- 
mouth and Lord Gower eagerly assured Grafton that, desert 
him who might, they would stand by him to the last ; but he 
more than suspected that the crew of three-bottle men who 
had been sailing under his nominal command from one dubi- 
ous adventure to another were already on the lookout for a 
more capable and less discredited captain with wdiom they 
might pursue during a renewed term of service their jovial 



brother's entanglement was such as history can hardly parallel.'' " Oh, 
my unhappy brother!" he says on the Sunday. "Born (one hoped) to a 
most prosperous scene of life, and qualified to shine in it, had he lived in 
such times as his father did, or indeed in any not so disturbed as these." 

14 



210 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

and lucrative trade of political freebooters. Sick of his follow- 
ers, and heartily disgusted with himself, he resigned an office 
to which he would under no circumstances have been equal, 
and into which he had been thrust before his character, which 
developed late, had acquired the dignity and solidity which 
came after his day of grace had passed. His conduct in com- 
ing years was such as to regain for him the esteem of the 
few; but he had not the native force to make his repentance 
and reformation so conspicuous as to redeem his credit with 
the many. The time was not very far distant when, as the 
subordinate member of a cabinet, he took a course which, if 
he had never been prime-minister, would have established his 
reputation for foresight and patriotism ; but the public at 
large, after paying him a momentary tribute of surprised ap- 
probation, soon relapsed into its former mental attitude, and 
remembered him once again as he had appeared beneath the 
fierce light that beats upon the Treasury. The portrait which 
had been bitten into the national memory by the acid of Ju- 
nius has never been obliterated. Thirty years after the duke 
had fallen from power, a friendly writer, wdio was his country 
neighbor, could not venture to record the thoughtful generos- 
ity by which he rescued the author of the " Farmer's Boy " 
from laborious penury without an elaborate apology for prais- 
ing one who was known almost exclusively as the object of 
the most famous diatribes in our language. A popular concep- 
tion which has lasted for a generation is likely to last for a 
century ; and when it has outlived a century, it may die, but 
it cannot be corrected. Doing penance for the accumulated 
sins and scandals of his colleagues, Grafton, while English is 
read, will continue to stand in his white sheet beneath the 
very centre of the dome in the temple of history. 

The king and his system, in this their dire peril, had the 
good wishes of one who was then the most famous among liv- 
ing political philosophers. As long as Grafton's resignation 
appeared to threaten the collapse of the royal policy, David 
Hume never knew a moment's peace. He saw in George the 
Third a representative of the autocratic principles of which 
he himself was the most attractive exponent, and the taskmas- 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 211 

ter of a people whom he loved as little as Nelson loved the 
French. Hume had suffered cruelly under the furious out- 
break of prejudice against everything that was Scotch, by 
which Southern patriotism avenged itself on Bute. A true 
artist, he kept out of his printed books all ungraceful and ob- 
trusive manifestations of his dislike for England and the Eng- 
lish ; but many a passage in his private correspondence shows 
how deeply the iron had entered into his soul. " From what 
human consideration," he asks Sir Gilbert Elliot, " can I pre- 
fer living in England than in foreign countries? Can you se- 
riousl}^ talk of my continuing an Englishman ? Am I, or are 
you, an Englishman ? Do they not treat with derision our 
pretensions to that name, and with hatred our just pretensions 
to surpass and govern them?"* The intimate connection be- 
tween Hume's constitutional theories and his sentiments with 
regard to the nation at whose expense the Charleses and the 
Jameses had put those theories in practice comes out strongly 
in the letters which he wrote during February, 1770. There 
was little fun, and that little very grim, in the remonstrance 
which he addressed to Adam Smith, who had gone south to 
make his bargain for the " Wealth of Nations " with a London 
publisher. What was the use, cried Hume, of wasting a book 
full of reason, sense, and learning upon a tribe of wicked and 
abandoned madmen? "Nothing but a rebellion and blood- 
shed will open the eyes of that deluded people ; though, were 
they alone concerned, I think it is no matter what becomes 
of them." " Our government," he wrote in the same month, 



1 This letter was written in September, 1764. Two years afterwards, 
when Smollett made the tour which is commemorated under a thin dis- 
guise in " Humphry Clinker," he found all the inn windows, from Doncaster 
northwards, still scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of the Scotch 
nation. In 1765, Sir Gilbert Elliot made a vigorous protest in Parliament 
against the international jealousy which had survived the Union, and de- 
clared that in his opinion Englishman and Scot were one. If he himself, 
he said, had merit enough, he should pretend to any English place. It 
certainly would have been difficult for him just then to have hit upon 
any illustration less calculated to recommend his sentiments to the audi- 
ence which he was addressiujj. 



212 THE EAKLY HISTOKY OF [Chap. VI. 

" has become a chimera, and is too perfect in point of liberty 
for so rude a beast as an Englishman, who is a man (a bad 
animal too) corrupted by above a century of licentiousness. I 
am running over again the last edition of my ' History,' in or- 
der to correct it still further. I either soften or expunge many 
villanous, seditious Wliig strokes which had crept into it. I 
am sensible that the first editions were too full of those fool- 
ish English prejudices Avhich all nations and all ages disavow." 
" The firm conduct " of George the Third, and liis " manly 
resentment" against subjects who were loath to surrender that 
freedom of parliamentary election which even the Stuarts did 
not contest, sent tlie historian to his proof-sheets fired by the 
conviction that he had not yet done enough to magnify Straf- 
ford, to canonize Laud, and to whitewash Jeffrej^s. 

After the fall of Grafton, Lord Korth became prime-min- 
ister ; if a designation may be applied to him which he never 
allowed to be used in his own family, on the theory that no 
such ofiice existed in the British Constitution. And, most 
assuredly, he had little claim to any title that conveyed an 
idea of predominance ; for he consented to place his indolent 
conscience and his excellent judgment without reserves or 
conditions in the hands of his sovereign. Adopting the royal 
views with a lazy docility, which, as his private correspondence 
proves, was sometimes hardly short of inexcusable dishonesty, 
he never hesitated about taking the royal road to a parliament- 
ary majority. Submission in the closet and corruption in the 
Commons were the watchwords of his disastrous and inglo- 
rious administration. Having obeyed where it was his duty 
to have protested, he had no resource but to bribe where it 
was impossible that he should ever convince. Idle and inat- 
tentive in all other departments of public business, he was 
vigilant and indefatigable in buying every borough, patron 
of a borough, and occupant of a borough that was in the mar- 
ket ; and he had plenty of ready wit and handy logic for 
those occasions when it became necessary to give his support- 
ers a justification for voting according to the promptings of 
their pocket.^ When his measures were so faulty or the re- 

* Fox, -ulio, with all his good-nature, was too much a born critic to 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 213 

suits of his policy so glaringly calamitous that the comments 
and expostulations of the Opposition could not be stifled by 
the uproar of his hired claque, he would step on to the floor 
with the air of a popular stage-manager who makes jokes in 
order to gain time and pacify the audience when something 
has gone hopelessly wrong behind the curtain. Speaking with 
unscrupulous tact and imperturbable temper, he seldom sat 
down without leaving on the minds of his followers a com- 
fortable sense of confidence in a statesman who could see the 
humorous side of a defeat or a deficit; and whose slumbers 
on the Treasury bench were only deepened and sweetened by 
the news that England had a province the less or an enemy 
the more, or that a village full of people M^ho a few years be- 
fore were loyal subjects of the king had perished beneath the 
torches and tomahawks of savages hired with the produce of a 
loan in whose profits half the cabinet had gone shares with 
the most favored of their supporters. 

Lord N^orth's first business was to reconstruct the adminis- 
tration. The influence of Chatham, acting on noble natures 
as silently and irresistibl}' as magnet upon steel, drew to it- 
self all the sterling metal which still lurked in any corner of 
the ofiicial fabric. Lord Howe refused to stay any longer in 
a government condemned by the statesman under whose in- 
spiration he had outdone himself in valor and conduct both 
by sea and land. Dunning went ; and James Grenville, the 
most agreeable, if the least eminent, of the brothers.' Lord 
Cornwallis had ridden as Granby's aide-de-camp at Minden, 
and was not going to desert him now. Their places M'ere sup- 
plied by professional oflice-holders, who received from Buck- 
ingham House detailed instructions when and how they were 
to speak, and on which side they were to go on voting until 

over-praise, when regaling Samuel Rogers with a general review of the 
oratory of his day, pronounced Lord North to be " a consummate de- 
bater." 

* " The day before yesterday," wrote George Grenville from Stowe, " we 
were surprised by the laughing and laughter-promoting Jemmy." Those 
pleasant epithets were certainly the last which could be applied to George 
Grenville himself. 



214 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

further orders.' The great seal, at which, since Yorke's death, 
all prudent lawyers more than ever looked askance, was in- 
trusted to three commissioners, who had not between them 
enough knowledge of equity to qualify for a taxing - mas- 
ter in Chancery, bat whose number and insignificance di- 
luted the unpopularity which would have been fatal to any 
single aspirant who should have posed as the equivalent of 
Camden. The privy seal went a-begging until Lord North, 
who had the courage of sloth in as large a measure as his 
royal master had the courage of energy, defied the Wilkites 
by bestowing it on his uncle, the Earl of Halifax, who, not 
three months before, had been cast in damages for having 
broken the law in his eagerness to persecute their hero. 

To say that Halifax had ruined his estate by extravagance 
and his constitution by strong liquor is to say that he had 
lived like every one of North's colleagues who attained to 
mediocrity. George the Third had now reached the platform 
towards which he had so long been struggling, and stood 
there, in his own estimation, every inch a king. He had a 
prime-minister clever enough to do him credit as a spokes- 
man, and so thick-skinned as to be invaluable for a whipping- 
boy ; a cabinet containing two or three respectabilities with- 
out a will of their own, and three or f5ur broken-down men 
of fashion who could not afford to throw away a quarter's 
salary; and a House of Commons which lent itself kindly to 
the process of parliamentary manipulation, the only one among 
all the branches of statecraft which the servants of his choice 

1 On the ninth of January, George the Third desired Lord North to 
press a member who, with some others, had, in his Majesty's opinion, taken 
things too easily during the previous session to exert himself in the 
coming debate ; " and I have no objection," said the king, " to your add- 
ing that I have particularly directed you to sj^eak to them on this occa- 
sion." On the thirty-first of the month this gentleman got an oppor- 
tunity to make his tirade, and inveighed hotly against the party which 
was defending the freedom of election as a combination whose object 
was to destroy the monarchy and abolish the House of Commons. The 
next morning the king signified to Lord North that he was satisfied with 
the performance ; and, before the week was out, the obedient orator had 
been rewarded with a good place in the new administration. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 215 

tlioronglily understood. Keeping up the constitutional fiction 
that the king acquiesced in a vicious policy out of his affec- 
tion for worthless ministers, and dutifully pretending to be 
ignorant that he put up with worthless ministers because none 
but they would consent to be the instruments of a vicious pol- 
icy, Junius implored liim to ask himself whether it was for 
his interest or his honor to live in perpetual disagreement 
with his people " merely to preserve such a chain of beings 
as North, Barrington, Weymouth, Gower, Ellis, Onslow, Eig-^ 
by, Jerry Dyson, and Sandwich," whose very names were a 
satire upon all government, and formed a catalogue which 
the gravest of the royal chaplains could not school liis voice 
to read without laughing. After a lapse of sixteen years the 
strictures of Junius were repeated by a far greater writer, in 
a " Birthday Ode " which has survived all the official verse 
that was laid at the foot of the throne from the first effusion 
of Eusden to the last of Pye. Having discovered, by the in- 
stinct of his own genius, the art of infusing the spirit of poe- 
try into the transient topics of the newspaper — an arf which 
Heine, w^ho alone among moderns possessed it to equal per- 
fection, confessed that he borrowed from the old Greek com- 
edy — Burns traced the prostration of Britain and the loss of 
her colonies to her sovereign's projDensity for committing the 
honor and welfare of the State to adventurers with a charac- 
ter which would not have got them a place in a decent Low- 
land homestead.' It was not that George the Third had any 

' " 'Tis very true, my sovereign king, 
My skill may weel be doubted ; 
But facts are chiels that wiuua ding, 

And downa be disputed. 
Your royal nest, beneatli your wing, 

Is e'en right reft and clouted ; 
And now the third part of the string, 
And less, will gang about it 

Thau did ae day. 

" Far be't frae me that I aspire 
To blame your legislation, 
Or say ye wisdom want, or fire, 
To rule this mighty nation. 



216 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

natural affinity for looseness of conduct or obliquity of prin- 
ciple, lie knew the worth of an honest man as well as any 
farmer on the Carrick Border. When there arose a question 
of keeping Lord Hertford in the embassy at Paris, the king 
observed to his minister that a respectable man must not be 
lightly cast aside, since he was not so fortunate as to have in 
his employment " too many people of decent and orderly be- 
liavior." Tliere was no affectation in the delight which he 
expressed at the prospect of enlisting in the cabinet the Earl 
of Dartmouth, who brought to his service good intentions 
strengthened by religious convictions, and brought nothing 
else. But the work that he gave his agents to do was of such 
a sort that, while he took the best whom he could obtain, the 
best were very bad. Burke, whose glance pierced the situa- 
tion through and through, foresaw that the king's success 
would be only the prelude to an entire break-up of the system 
of personal government. " The Court," he wrote, " perseveres 
in the pursuit, and is near to the accomplishment, of its pur- 
pose. But when the work is perfected, it may be nearest to 
its destruction ; for the principle is wrong, and the materials 
are rotten." A vivid and correct imagination, while it sees 
beneath the surface of processes, almost invariably antedates 
results.' Though the end arrived at last, it was slower in 
coming than Burke had predicted. For twelve successive 
years the country continued to be administered in exact ac- 
cordance with George the Tliird's theory of an ideal constitu- 
tion ; but the price which his subjects had to pay was too 

But, faith ! I rauckle doubt, my sire, 

Ye've trusted ministration 
To cliaps wlia in a barn or byre 

Wad better filled their station 

Than courts you day." 

' The distinguished Frenchmen with whom Mr. Senior conversed at 
Paris between 1853 and 1860 were very acute in discerning the causes 
which ultimately brought about the fall of Louis Napoleon; but none of 
them, in making their forecasts, would give those causes time to work. 
The more sanguine among the Orleanists hardly allowed the empire four 
years out of the eighteen which were its allotted portion. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 217 

heavy a fee even for so complete and conclusive a course of 
political philosophy, illustrated by practical experiments. 

During the first months of that long period the wheels of 
the ministerial chariot drove heavily. George Grenville, who 
knew himself to be dying, and whose public conscience had 
been reawakened by the confidential intercourse which he 
once again maintained with his great relative, was in a hurry 
to employ the strength and time that remained to him in get- 
ting something accomplished which, if he could not be liked 
during his life, wonld cause him to be remembered with grat- 
itude after it. A born House of Commons man, if ever there 
was one, he made it his last ambition to purify the only at- 
mosphere which he had ever breathed with satisfaction. The 
moral degradation of that assembly, where he had been long 
the proud leader and always the contented drudge, aroused in 
him one of those tempests of indignation to which tlie gravest 
English statesmen, fortunately for their country, are occasion- 
ally liable, and which by their beneficent violence have cleared 
the ground for some of the best laws that grace our Statute- 
book. He introduced a bill constituting a select and respon- 
sible tribunal for the trial of election petitions, which hitherto 
had been decided in a committee of the whole House, with as 
much regard to justice as could be expected from a court 
where the most scrupulous man could not but be biassed by 
the reflection that the fate of the ministry, and it might well 
be of the nation, depended on his voting with his party against 
the merits of the cause — a court whose numbers were elastic ; 
whose members might come and go at pleasure ; which was 
thin to hear evidence, and full to pronounce sentence ; and to 
which nineteen out of twenty among the judges brought 
either a mind made up, or a verdict to be sold for love or 
money.' Grenville was heard throughout his clear and in- 



* Tlie ladies, by ancient custom, alwajs attended the trial of a petition 
in crowds, or, as an ungallant peer complained, in droves ; and the mem- 
ber whose fete was at stake found it necessary to borrow from his friends, 
if he had not enough pretty sisters and cousins of his own. So much in 
earnest were the queens of beauty of these indecorous political tourna- 



218 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

structive statement of the abuses that he deplored, and the 
remedy that he had devised, with a respectful interest which 
passed into willing and almost unanimous conviction as he 
concluded in a strain of genuine feeling that lent a touch of 
pathos to the close of his stern and unlovely career. The 
hearers whom he had lectured and wearied for thirty years 
were astonished, and even awed, when he entreated them to 
console his days, now fast running out, with the thought that 
he had contributed, in however small a degree, to the improve- 
ment of the House of Commons — "a house," he said, "for 
which I have that established affection that induces a man to 
die for the honor of the ship he is engaged in." When the 
principle of a bill which George Grenville had drafted was 

ments that ou one occasion when the Speaker ordered strangers to with- 
draw, it took the doorkeepers two hours to clear the gallery. Of all 
Grenville's arguments against the existing system, none told more than 
his description of the manner in which honorable gentlemen, forgetting 
that they ought to be giving their attention as closely as jurymen who 
would have no judge to direct them, absented themselves in pairs from 
the hearing of the case during the hours required for the carouse which 
then was called a dinner. And yet they were just as well away ; for they 
could not afford to listen as men open to conviction when, as not unfre- 
quently happened, the confirming or invalidating of an election became 
a stand-and-fiill question. Sir Robert Walpole went out because the 
members of Parliament who had taken bribes from himself to vote that 
the burgesses of Chippenham had been bought were less numerous 
by one than the members who hoped to get pensions and places from his 
successor by voting that those burgesses were pure. Camden, as a young 
lawyer, had been counsel for the petitioners, and his professional con- 
science was hurt by the congratulations which he received on having 
given the death-blow to the great minister ; " a compliment," he said, 
" which I don't desire, but am content with having served my clients 
faithfully." Even exceptionally high-minded men were not ashamed of 
allowing that they had voted about an election on party grounds; and 
an appeal to any other motive would have been scouted by the lower 
class of parliamentary tacticians as claptrap. When Lord Clive was un- 
seated for St. Michael's, Rigby wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, analyzing 
and commenting on the division. "We were defeated," he says, " by the 
Tories going against us. The numbers were two hundred and seven 
against one hundred and eighty-three. I hope your Grace, nor none of 
your friends, will have mercy on those rascally Tories any more." 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 219 

approved, its details mig-lit safely be taken on trust. Recom- 
mended by liis authority, the measure went smoothly and rap- 
idly through all its stages ; and the grosser scandals which ■ 
disgraced our elections began steadily, though slowly, to abate 
from the day when the jurisdiction of a parliamentary com- 
mittee became a terror to evil-doers, instead of a machinery 
which the party in power ruthlessly worked for the purpose 
of increasing its own majority. 

Grenville, who in his worst days had never been a hypo- 
crite or a coward, did not deceive himself, and had no inten- 
tion of flattering his brother-members with the pretence that 
bribery, so rife in the constituencies, was unknown in the 
House of Commons. He was not one of those who do either 
good or ill by halves. Striking right and left among the heads 
of the hydra, he had hardly sat down, after calling attention 
to the method of trying election petitions, when he rose once 
more to move for an inquiry into the expenditure of the Civil 
List. The unexpected proposal struck consternation far and 
wide. Ministers who could not have kej)t their places for a 
day unless they had the king's purse as well as the king's fa- 
vor to rely on, and ministerial supporters who, but for timely 
subsidies from the royal strong-box, must have exchanged the 
costly delights of Arthur's and of Ascot for the dull economy 
of their country-houses, felt their hearts low within them 
when an ex-first lord who knew every secret of the Treasury, 
and whose failing health excluded him from that prospect of 
a return to office which is so potent to mitigate the reforming 
zeal of an opposition, came forward in the character of a finan- 
cial inquisitor. How was it, asked Grenville, that the late 
king, spending like a king, could pay his way and leave a hun- 
dred and seventy thousand pounds as a nest-egg for his suc- 
cessor, while his present Majesty, though practising a personal 
frugality that would be most Laudable if the tax-payer had 
benefited by it, had already, in the tenth year of his reign, 
been reduced to apply to Parliament for the means of dis- 
charging a debt of half a million? The question was an- 
swered by Barre, who said, in plain English, that the money 
which the nation supplied to its sovereign in the loyal hope 



220 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CiiAr. VI. 

that he would employ it to gratify his private tastes and 
maintain his regal state had gone in debauching the House 
of Commons. But the frightful misfortunes arising from the 
subservience of Parliament and the clandestine profusion of 
the Crown, which ten years afterwards strengthened the arm 
of Burke and gave an edge to his weapon, had not as yet 
reached their climax ; and the honor of storuiing the strong- 
hold of corruption was reserved for a knight whose own shield 
was stainless. Lord North, an adept in all the more shallow 
and showy arts of jDarliamentary leadership, parried the attack 
by congratulating Grenville on having taken so kindly to the 
trade of an apostle of purity, for wdiicli his previous life had 
been but a queer apprenticeship ; and when other members, 
whose antecedents were such that their mouths could not be 
closed by an epigram, pressed the prime-minister for a more 
courteous and adequate explanation, the dependents of the 
government drowned any further discussion by clamoring 
like a chorus of foxhounds who suspect that somebody has 
designs upon their porridge. 

But there was one voice which they could not silence. De- 
termined that, listen who would, the truth should be spoken, 
Chatham renewed in the Lords the motion that had been 
dropped in the Commons, and mercilessly exposed the arti- 
fices of ministers, who, by bribing lavishly out of the resources 
of the Civil List, and then challenging Parliament, on its loy- 
alty, to pay the king's debts and ask no questions, obtained an 
unlimited power of drawing upon the nation for funds where- 
with to suborn the national representatives. The jackals of 
the Treasury soon found an opportunity for demanding that 
his words should be taken down ; but to take dovv'n Cliatham's 
words was like binding over Cromwell to keep the peace on 
the morning of Naseby. Supremely careless whether or not 
the clerks at the table entered on the journals of the House 
phrases which, as he uttered them, took rank at once in the 
literature of his country, he plainly and boldly declared that 
he, for one, would trust no sovereign in the world with the 
means of buying up the liberties of his people. In a time of 
profound peace abroad, when no delicate negotiation for the 



1770.] CIIArvLES JAMES FOX. 221 

purchase of State secrets, wliicli publicity miglit hamper, was 
going forward at Paris or Madrid ; with a virtuous king, who 
had no expensive vices to nourish and conceal— what reason, 
except the most dishonorable of all, could exist for refusing an 
inquiry ? How had his Majesty spent the money which had 
been exacted in his name? Was it in building palaces worthy 
of liis position among monarchs ; in encouraging tlie liberal 
and useful arts; in rewarding veterans who, after defending 
his quarrel in many a rough campaign, were starving on pen- 
sions which the upper servants of a nobleman would despise 
as wages? Or was it not rather in procuring a Parliament 
which, like a packed jury, was always ready, if a minister was 
in the dock, to say " not guilty " in the teeth of proof, and 
with absolute indifference to consequences? 
/ This grave accusation, which Chatham had forcibly but not 
unfairly put, was repeated almost immediately by those who 
were most concerned in ascertaining the truth of it. The peo- 
ple could not endure the thought that their House of Com- 
mons, a traditional pride in which was interwoven in every 
fibre of the national character, should have degenerated into 
a body the majority of whose members were guilty of such 
conduct and actuated by such motives that, even to this day, 
it is not easy to name individuals among them for fear of 
giving pain to their worthier descendants.' The inhabitants 
of Westminster and London, of Middlesex and Surrey, and 
all that constituted the district which then was the heart and 
brain of England, had long ago petitioned the king to dissolve 
Parliament, and leave it for the country to pronounce between 



' As early as 1768 an incident occurred which showed what the public 
thought of its representatives, and what those representatives thought of 
themselves. One Thornton, a milk-seller, was at the trouble to print and 
placard Bond Street with the speech which Oliver Cromwell made when 
the Long Parliament was dissolved. Though not a word of comment 
was prefixed or appended to the text, every honorable gentleman who 
read the handbills, as soon as he reached the sentence beginning " Ye 
are a pack of mercenary wretches," pronounced it a libel upon the as- 
sembly to which he belonged ; and Thornton was straightway committed 
to Newgate. 



222 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

the law and its violators. When their prayers procured them 
no redress, and, as they complained, scanty civility, their 
leaders suggested to them the bold and novel expedient of 
approaching the throne with remonstrances upon the answers 
which had been returned to their petitions. The City led the 
way with an address which was conceived in the spirit of the 
famous instrument whence its title was borrowed, and the 
very language of which recalled the English that was spoken 
and written in the best days of the seventeenth century. The 
authors of the Grand Kemonstranee might have been proud 
to father the sentences in which the Liverymen of London 
rehearsed how, though they had laid their wrongs and their 
desires before their sovereign with the humble confidence of 
dutiful subjects, their complaints still remained unanswered ; 
their injuries had been confirmed ; and the only judge re- 
movable at the pleasure of the Crown had been expelled from 
his high office for defending the Constitution, " We owe to 
your Majesty," the petitioners went on to say, " an obedience 
under the restriction of the laws ; and your Majesty owes to 
us that our representation, free from the force of arms or cor- 
ruption, should be preserved to us in Parliament." In the 
reign of James the Second, Englishmen had complained that 
the sitting of Parliament was interrupted because it was not 
corruptly subservient to the designs of the king. They com- 
plained now that the sitting of Parliament was not interrupt- 
ed because it was corruptly subservient to the designs of min- 
isters. And therefore his Majesty's remonstrants assured 
themselves that his Majesty would restore peace to his people 
by dissolving such a Parliament and removing such evil min- 
isters forever from his councils. 

Those ministers, naturally enough, would have been pleased 
if so formidable a document could have been encountered 
with the conventional reply, and consigned to the summary 
oblivion, which are the predestined fate of memorials to the 
Crown ; but the sheriffs of London, who both were leading 
members of Parliament, insisted on the right, which the City 
shared with the two universities and the two branches of the 
legislature, of approaching the king in person, with all the 



1770.] CHARLES JxVMES FOX. 223 

train and state of royalty about him, Tlie courtiers were tlior- 
otiglily frightened ; and the cabinet began to look for prece- 
dents which might permit them to insist that the corporation 
should limit the numbers of the deputation, and agree to be 
satisfied with a private reception. But George the Third, who, 
with the obstinacy which endangers dynasties, was endowed 
with the calm resolution which seldom has failed to save them, 
would not let his honor out of his own keeping, and an- 
nounced to Lord North that, however it might have been in 
the past, the present occasion was one on which he did not 
choose to shrink from an interview with his subjects. On 
the fourteenth of March the lord mayor and the sheriffs came 
westward, attended by an immense but not disorderly multi- 
tude. The king received them seated on his throne. The 
common sergeant began to read the Remonstrance ; but 
the poor man had over-estimated his own courage and self- 
command when he undertook to be the mouthpiece of such 
sentiments in such a presence, and he was fain to hand over 
the paper to the town-clerk long before he came to the con- 
cluding prayer of the petition. The king listened with pa- 
tience and composure to the uncourtly doctrines which pierced 
through the courteous phrases in which they were thinly 
draped.' lie knew very well, as Junius said, that no one ex- 

' Home furnished the Piibllc Advertiser with an account of the presen- 
tation of the Remonstrance, disfigured by such vulgar spite and dis- 
honesty as to throw some discredit uj^on tlie party which lie espoused. 
With much reading, but less culture than Wilkes, and far less mother- 
wit, he was already bent on outbidding him in the estimation of the 
populace. "When his Majesty" (so Home wrote) "had done reading 
his speech, the lord mayor had the honor of kissing his Majesty's hand; 
after wdiich his Majesty instantly turned round to his courtiers and burst 
out a-laughing. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning." The Court was 
so ill-advised as to proceed against the printer of this trash; but it got 
no satisfaction except an apology from Home, who inserted a paragraph 
to the effect that, in view of the great offence which he had given by an 
assertion made on a former occasion, he frankly withdrew that assertion, 
and admitted that Nero did not fiddle when Rome was burning. Such 
were the unseemly slights to which the king exposed the royal dignity in 
his attempt to make it more imposing than his grandfather had left it. 



224 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Cuap. VL 

cept a gentleman usher would tliink it a season for compli- 
ments. But the petitioners must have been sanguine, indeed, 
if they hoped that George the Third would be either enlight- 
ened or alarmed by their free speaking. He dismissed them 
with a round reproof, and at once set his usual apparatus to 
work in order to procure them from another quarter a still 
severer punishment for their presumption. 

The necessary arrangements were soon made for inciting 
Parliament to pass resolutions condemnatory of a petition 
which, whether or not it was, as the king had pronounced it 
in his reply, disrespectful to the Crown, undoubtedly could not 
be construed in the light of a compliment to the House of 
Commons, The task of calling upon that House to reprobate 
the audacity of those who had prayed the king to dissolve it 
as corrupt was, with exquisite propriety, intrusted to a mem- 
ber who had hitherto voted with the Opposition because he 
wanted nothing for liimself, and who now voted with the 
government because he wanted something for his brother. 
Exhilarated by finding that there still was an untrodden cor- 
ner of the field over which they had so long been battling, the 
ministerialists rushed to arms. At first there appeared to pre- 
vail very nearly a unanimity of unrighteous indignation. 
Beckford, the lord mayor. Sheriff Townsend, and Sheriff Saw- 
bridge, and Trecothick, who, though less of a partisan than the 
other Whig representatives of the City, was too much of a 
man to desert his brother-aldermen in the moment of adver- 
sity, rose one after the other to avow and to justify in firm 
but respectful terms tlie share they had taken in a course of 
action which was almost obligatory on a corporation that had 
always endeavored to deserve its own special liberties and 
privileges by jealously guarding those which were common to 
Englishmen. Their protests were received with jeers and in- 
terruptions, unbecoming as directed against brother-senators; 
but much more than unbecoming when addressed by judges 
to culprits who were standing upon their defence. North, 
speaking, as the reporter commemorates, " in a very high 
style," so far from remonstrating with his followers for treat- 
ing their accused colleagues badly, marvelled at their lenity in 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 225 

not having altogetlier denied a liearing to people whom lie 
called agitators and hinted at as Lankrnpts — an insinuation 
which was pointless when aimed at men any one of whose 
names would have been worth more on the back of a bill than 
those of all his cabinet together. Inflamed by such an appeal 
to their evil passions from the minister who was responsible 
for the prudence of their resolves and the decency of their 
proceedings, honorable gentlemen were ready and eager to 
vote by acclamation that they themselves were immaculate 
and their detractors calumnious; but there were those among 
them who intended, however little the knowledge might affect 
its decision, that at all events the House should know what it 
was doing. Burke reminded his audience that they were now 
entering upon another stage of the downward road ; that, after 
having successfully combated the right of election, they now 
were on the verge of committing themselves to a campaign 
against the right of petition ; and that with such a prospect 
before them, the least observant and the most reckless ought 
at last to acknowledge that rulers could only go from bad to 
worse so long as they persisted in doing violence to the senti- 
ments of a nation. There was nothing inglorious, he entreated 
them to remember, in yielding to the people of England. And 
when the ignoble throng which professed to represent that 
people greeted his expostulations with the noisy impertinence 
from which, taking his career as a whole, he suffered in pro- 
portion as the causes which he advocated were wase and just, 
he was goaded into exclaiming, in much the same words as 
those which Chatham had used the day before in another 
place, that wdiile a man would be roared at inside the House 
if he were to call Parliament corrupt, he would be ashamed in 
any private company whatsoever to maintain the paradox that 
it was pure. Burke, though brilliant as ever, was outshone by 
AVedderburn, who during that spring session of 1770 made a 
series of the most thoughtful, and certainly the most impres- 
sive, speeches that ever proceeded from lips which were to 
unsay within a twelvemonth every syllable that they had ut- 
tered. Following, as was his wont, immediately upon the at- 
torney-general, as if to force the government to observe the 

15 



226 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

contrast between its actual and its possible law-officer, lie 
showed by historical examples that while the House of Com- 
mons had always jealously guarded the right of a subject to 
petition his sovereign, it had never been so precise and out- 
spoken in its assertion of that right as in cases where the mat- 
ter of the petition related to the summoning and dissolving 
of Parliament.' And then, having established his position, and 
proved how ancient and how firmly based was the privilege 
which, if the Court had its way, was thenceforward to be a 
dead letter, he besought them not to add folly to illegality, 
but, if they must test the forbearance of Englishmen, to make 
the experiment on some weak and solitary individual rather 
tlian on the leading city of the world — a city which, the last 
time that it seriously exerted itself in the cause of freedom, 
never ceased to bear testimony against the tyranny of the 
Crown until the Stuarts, passing from crime to crime, had de- 
stroyed its very existence as an organized municipality by 
methods which in the daj^s of the Brunswicks no sane minis- 
ter would venture to employ. But the dangers of the future 
weighed as lightly with Wedderburn's hearers as the prece- 
dents of the past ; and Parliament by great majorities ex- 
pressed, in every form that the constitution would permit, its 

' After sliow'ing that the crime of not suffering others than themselves 
" to come near the king to advise him " had been one of the charges 
which cost the favorites of the feebler Plantagenets their heads; after 
relating how, under Charles the Second, the House had voted for im- 
peaching Lord Chief-justice North, the ancestor of the prime-minister, 
and had addressed the king to dismiss Jeffreys from his offices, because 
that pair of worthies had contrived to get a proclamation issued for the 
purpose of discouraging the jDeople from petitioning for the calling of 
a Parliament ; after instancing how a previous House of Commons had 
actually expelled one of its members for taking on his own account a 
course precisely similar to that which the ministry was now urging the 
existing House of Commons to pursue — Wedderburn closed his list of 
cases by quoting a resolution proposed in the reign of William the Third 
by the Lord Hartington of the day, and carried by a majority of two to 
cue, which declared " that it is the undoubted right of the people of Eng- 
land to petition or address the king for the calling, sitting, and dissolv- 
ing of parliaments." 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 227 

vehement and reiterated condemnation of an act which had 
been deliberately sanctioned, with one dissenting voice, by 
three thousand of the citizens of London in common hall as- 
sembled. 

And now it seemed as if the unscrupulous proceedings of 
the cabinet and the Court were at length about to produce the 
consequences which, in a nation resolute to preserve the bless- 
ings of law and order, are the inevitable fruit of illegality and 
violence in high places. On the twenty-third of March, the 
two Houses elicited an assurance of gratitude from the king 
by informing him of the indignation with which they viewed 
the excesses^'into which his misguided subjects had been se- 
duced by "the insidious suggestions of ill-designing men;"' 
and the estates of the realm had hardly fulminated their joint 
rebuke against the citizens of London when it became abun- 
dantly evident that the spirit which prompted the remon- 
strance was abroad everywhere within thirty miles of Corn- 
hill. On the morning of the twenty-eighth of March, the 
electors of Westminster came to a unanimous resolution to 
imitate the example of the Livery, and within half an hour 
their address was in the king's hands; so determined were 
they to be the first to announce that, as Chatham phrased it, 
they were not "frightened out of their birthrights by big 
words from the destroyers of them." Middlesex followed suit 
on the thirtieth ; and the City, with a deliberation evincing its 
sense of the gravity of the contest into which it had been 
forced, took measures for repeating an offence which, on the 
second occasion, could not be expected to pass without some- 
thing more serious than a reprimand. In a few weeks at the 
lates't. Lord North and his colleagues would have to say 
whether they were prepared to anticipate that measure 
against the port and town of Boston which was soon to set 
the mother-country and her colonies by the ears, and bring 
forward a bill of pains and penalties against the City of Lon- 
don. They were beginning to learn the truth of Burke's 
warning, when he told them that they must either act with 
the people or fight against them, since they had " no other 
materials to work upon but those out of which God had been 



228 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VL 

pleased to form the inhabitants of this island." It was idle to 
explain, as their pamphleteers attempted to explain, the diffi- 
culties and dangers of the situation by cavils and recrimina- 
tions which resolved themselves into the " short but discour- 
aging proposition that we have a very good ministry, but that 
we are a very bad people." The discontent, which %vas now 
all but universal among those who were not paid to be con- 
tented, armed every assailant of the Court with an authority 
tenfold that which in quiet times he would have commanded 
by his own talents, and a hundredfold that which attached it- 
self to the pensioned scribes who defended the ministerial 
policy, though the acknowledged chief of British literature 
was conspicuous among them. Under the pressure of an ap- 
peal to his gratitude, which he justly regarded as a cruel 
wrong, and which to the. day of his death he never even af- 
fected to forgive, Johnson submitted himself once more to the 
slavery which in earlier life he had endured under the pinch 
of necessity, and with much the same feelings towards both 
his employers, became the hack of North the minister, as he 
of old had been the hack of Osborne the bookseller — if a hack 
be he who writes badly and reluctantly on a theme select- 
ed for him by others. Those who had sat at the feet of 
the Rambler could not conceal their feeling of disappoint- 
ment, and almost of personal injury, when they were invited 
to search the pages of the " False Alarm" for such moral truths 
as that the expressions of shame and wrath with which an 
honest man heard that his parliamentary representative had 
been bought with a handful of bank-notes were " outcries ut- 
tered by malignity and echoed by folly," or for such jewels 
of political science as the proposition that the farmers and 
shopkeepers of Yorkshire and Cumberland need not know or 
care how Middlesex was represented.' Strong, indeed, must 



^ AVhoever would see, in the space of a couple of pages, the difference 
between the work of great men when taking the right side of a question 
which they understand and the wrong side of a question which they do 
not, should compare the account of the process of getting up a county 
petition, which is the best, or at any rate the least feeble, passage in the 
'• False Alarm," with the paragraph in the " Thoughts on the Discontents " 



1770.] CHARLKS JAMES FOX. 229 

have been the party spirit of a reader who could excuse 
Johnson for consenting to expose such a reputation to a vent- 
ure from the consequences of wliich it never recovered until, 
at a time of life when the world has as little right to expect 
a masterpiece from an author as a brilliant campaign from a 
general, he delighted every one, and astonished all but those 
who were admitted to the fearful joys of his familiar talk, by 
producing with matchless case and rapidity a whole series of 
biographies almost as pleasing, and quite as powerful, as any 
that have appeared from Plutarch downwards. 

Junius, meanwhile, at the height of a popularity which to 
a calm and somewhat indifferent posterity seems at times a 
more curious problem even tlian his identity, did not conde- 
scend to retaliate upon the disputants who challenged him 
on behalf of the government. Too proud and too shrewd 
to fatigue or bemire himself by charging into their highly 
disciplined but faint-hearted ranks, with the true instinct of 
a polemical strategist he marched straight against the key of 
the hostile position. Until the end of 1769 he had flown at 
no nobler quarry than a prime-minister, and had been satis- 
fied with the amusement of smijing grimly at the flutter 
caused in the higher ranks of the peerage when the PubliG 
Advertiser came out with an announcement of " Junius to an- 
other duke in our next ;" but at last, on the nineteenth of De- 
cember, appeared his " Letter to the King." Instead of heark- 
ening to the counsels embodied in this admirable composi- 
tion — counsels which no one w^itli judgment would call, inju- 
dicious, and which it is a pity that a plain-spoken and stout- 
hearted man like his Majesty should have regarded as disre- 
sjDectfuP — George the Third, after taking Christmas to think 

which argues, no better than Burke in that marvellous production argues 
everything, how it is that when the peojile and their rulers are at odds, 
"the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the peoi^le." 

' " The doctrine inculcated by our laws, that the king can do no wrong, 
is admitted without reluctance. We separate the amiable, good-natured 
prince from the folly and treachery of his servants, and the private vir- 
tues of the man from the vices of his government. Were it not for this 
just distinction, I know not whether your Ma,iesty's condition or that of 



230 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

it over, could light upon no more seasonable device for pro- 
moting peace and good-will than the prosecution of everybody 
who had been concerned in publishing, reprinting, or selling 
what he insisted upon viewing as a libel. As soon as the 
new year opened, the King's Bench was at work on the cases ; 
and on the thirteenth of January, "VYoodfall, the editor of the 
Advertise)', was brought np for trial. Lord Mansfield, in con- 
formity with the legal doctrine, for maintaining which he 
was unmercifully punished in the House of Lords by Camden 
and Chatham, and of which Junius did not let him hear the 
last until the last had been heard of Junius, charged the jury 
to consider whether the defendant had published the letter 
set out in the information, but instructed them that they 
had no business with the more vital point, whether that let- 
ter was a false and malicious libel or a veracious and public- 
spirited manifesto. The jury, however, read their duty other- 
wise ; and their verdict of "Guilty of printing and publish- 
ing o«7y" secured the liberty of the press until the period 
when, in the height of the anti-Jacobin panic, writers obnox- 
ious to the Court ceased for a time to have the middle classes 
on their side. 

While the ministry were forced to abandon the hope of 
getting Junius or his coadjutors into prison, they looked for- 
ward with dismay to the moment when "Wilkes should be out 
of it. The eighteenth of April would see the .tribune at 
large ; free to go remonstrating to St. James's in his alder- 
man's gown, at the head of as many of the Livery as could 
squeeze themselves into the throne-room ; free to march into 
Palace Yard, with all Farringdon and Bishopsgate at his back, 
in order to place himself by force in the seat which still was 
his by law. With Wilkes at libertj^, agitating for a new Par- 



the English nation would deserve most to be lamented. Your subjects, 
sir, wish for nothing but that, as they are reasonable and affectionate 
enough to separate your person from your government, so you^ in your 
turn, should distinguish between the conduct which becomes the perma- 
nent dignity of a king and that which serves only to promote the tem- 
porary interest and miserable ambition of a minister." 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 231 

liainent; with Junius, in letters that sold a double impression 
of every journal into which they were pirated, hinting one 
day that Lord North's head was growing too heavy for his 
shoulders, and sneering at him the next as having no knowl- 
edge of finance except what he had gathered through George 
Grenville's keyhole, and no pretensions to oratory beyond 
the fact that he spoke like Demosthenes when his mouth was 
full of pebbles, the prime-minister began to fear that he was 
destined to have the fate of Strafford without his fame. It 
was waste of words to recommend concession to his royal 
master. At the first mention of an appeal to the constitu- 
encies, the king had laid his hand upon his sword, and had 
said plainly that he would have recourse to that sooner than 
be coerced into a dissolution. The Court was murmuring be- 
cause the City was let off too easily, and his Majesty was com- 
plaining that his ministers had no spirit,' at a conjuncture when 
men whose temperament did not lead them to exaggerate the 
significance of a political situation were aghast at witnessing 
the Crown and the Parliament committed to a conflict with 
the population not only of the capital, but of the most pros- 
perous and thickly inhabited districts in the island. Horace 
"VValpole terrified his correspondent at Florence with a strik- 
ing exposition of the misgivings which possessed him while 
the event was still in the future. The crisis (so he wrote to 
Mann) was tremendous. If it became necessary to chastise 
London in the person of its mayor and sheriffs, many noble- 
men and members of Parliament would demand to be includ- 
ed in their sentence. The Tower, crammed with such proud 
criminals, would be a formidable scene indeed. The counties 
would enforce their petitions by remonstrances, and their re- 
monstrances by refusals to pay the land-tax. Rebellion was 

' Calcraft to Chatham, March 24 and 27. Junius affirms, in a foot- 
note to his republished letters, that George the Third was so much af- 
fected by the unwillingness of his ministers to impeach the lord mayor 
and the sheriffs that he was reduced to live upon potatoes for three weeks 
in order to keep off a fever. But the foot-notes of Junius, unfortunately 
for the picturesqueness of history, must not be taken as fragments of 
gospel. 



232 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

in everybody's mouth ; and nothing could avert it unless the 
prime mover of all the discord and confusion could be induced 
to see that it was easier for a king of England to disarm the 
minds of his subjects than their hands. " The English may 
be soothed," said Walpole. " I never read that they were to 
be frightened. This is my creed, and all our history supports 
it." Hume predicted a revolution still more confidently than 
Walpole, and very much more complacently. He watched 
the march of events with an historian's eye for an effect, and 
in jovial expectation of the troubles that were impendiug 
over the nation which he detested. Party bigotry, acting 
upon natures worthy of a better inspiration, has prodnced 
some singular results; but, if it were not self -drawn, few 
would i-egard as anything short of caricatnre the picture of a 
humorist, so kind-hearted, tolerant, and playful that an epi- 
cure in society would almost consent to have lived a century 
ago for tlie pleasure of his company, exclaiming against his 
own ill-luck in having been born a century too early to enjoy 
the privilege of narrating the disruption and ruin of the com- 
munity of which he was himself a citizen.' 

The elements of a political convulsion had, indeed, long 
been brewing : an obstinate court ; an enraged people ; a 
press teased, but not restrained, by a feeble and meddling 

* "I live still," Hume wrote from Edinburgh in October, 1769, "and 
must for a twelvemonth, in my old house, which is very cheerful, and 
even elegant, but too small to display my gi'eat talent for cookery, the 
science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my life. I 
have just now lying on the table before me a receipt for making soupe 
a la reiue, copied with my own hand. For beef and cabbage (a charm- 
ing dish), and old mutton and old claret, nobody excels me. All my 
friends encourage me in this ambition, as thinking it will redound very 
much to my honor. 

"I am delighted to see the daily and hourly progress of madness and 
folly and wickedness in England. The consummation of these qualities 
are the true ingredients for making a fine narrative in history, esiDecially 
if followed by some signal and ruinous convulsion, as I hope will soon be 
the case with that i^ernicious people. He must be a very bad cook in- 
deed who cannot make a palatable dish from the whole. You see, in my 
reflections and allusions, that I mix my old and new professions together." 



1770.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 233 

censorship; a Parliament where the minority spoke with a 
freedom which stirred the nation, and the majority voted 
with a servihty which exasperated it. Nothing was lacking 
but a leader; and that void would be supplied on the day 
when Wilkes, uniting in his person the most formidable and 
most incongruous attributes — an enemy of the governing 
powers, with the law on his side ; an idol of the mob, with 
the gravest constitutional statesmen in the country for his 
high-priests — should walk from the prison where he had been 
unjustly confined to the door of the House of Commons 
which was illegally shut against him. A dozen supplement- 
ary numbers of the North Briton^ and half a dozen monster 
meetings at Mile End and Moorfields, at York and Bristol 
and Newcastle, with Grenville or Savile in the chair and 
Wilkes on the platform, would have forced George the Third 
to make up his mind speedily and decisively between draw- 
ing his sword and calling a new Parliament ; and in that 
Parliament, as every bye-election in the large constituencies 
proved, the ministry would not command a single unpur- 
chased vote. With all the genuine representatives of the 
people on the one side, and nothing but the nominees of 
boroughmongers on the other — w^itli Burke denouncing the 
infamies and prodigalities of the Civil List, and Chatham 
thundering for triennial parliaments, and for a hundred ad- 
ditional knights of the shire elected by household suffrage — 
1832 would have been anticipated by two generations, and, 
the throne being filled as it then was, the triumph of j^opular 
principles could hardlj^ have been effected without bloodshed. 
But in order that history may anticipate or repeat itself, 
something more is required than a similarity of circumstances. 
The hour had come ; but the hour is nothing without the 
man. The stage was clear for a Mirabeau ; but the gentle- 
man who was cast for the character had no fancy for the 
part. Both in his good and bad qualities, Wilkes stands alone 
among all the personages upon whom Clio has conferred an 
equal share of her attention. Though far from great, he was 
too strong and too clever to have greatness thrust upon him. 
Ilis fancy must often have been tickled by the contrast be- 



234 THE EAKLY IIISTOllY OF [Chap. VI. 

tween his sober estimate of himself and the more than heroic 
proportions which he attained in the ejes of others. Accord- 
ing to his admirers, there was no one since E-ienzi wlio was 
even good enough to be compared with him. He was Grac- 
chus, and Drusus, and Timoleon without tlie dagger. lie liad 
been elected for Middlesex as often and as deservedly as 
Marius had been chosen consul. He had returned from 
France, said Diderot, a nobler Coriolanus, meditating not the 
ruin of his country, but her salvation. His detractors, wrote 
Junius, might profess to regret that he allowed the pleasures 
of life to compete with the glorious business of instructing 
and directing the people; but the people loved and revered 
their teacher none the less because they knew that lie united 
the public virtues of a Cato with the cheerful indulgence of 
an Epicurus. The only acknowledgment of all this antiquated 
flattery which could be extracted from the object of it (who, 
if he had cared to bandy compliments out of the classics, pos- 
sessed sound learning enough to repay the tinsel of his ad- 
mirers with sterling coin) was a not very sincere assurance 
that a line of applause from the pen which had undone Graf- 
ton made his blood run as quick " as a kiss from Chloe." 
When Junius urged him not to make his presence, which 
was to work such wonders for the commonwealth, too cheap 
and familiar by walking so frequently in the streets, AVilkes 
candidly admitted that if he took the advice and kept indoors 
it would be from no loftier motive than fear of " the greatest 
villains out of hell, the bailiffs." And the only project for 
the repair of the violated constitution in which, as the result 
of three lengthy and carefully indited appeals to his patriot- 
ism, the father of his country (for that was one of his titles) ' 

' " Johauni Wilkes, armigero : 
Qui reiiDublicoe restituit rem : 

Patri Patriae ; 
Coroiaam banc necti gratus 
Jussit Apollo." 
Sucli are a few choice morsels from a hasli of prose and verse, stolen from 
various periods of Latin literature, with which Wilkes was flattered as a 
politician, and must have been considerably diverted as a scholar, during 
his visit to King's Lynn in 1771. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 235 

could be pei'suaded to engage, was the composition of a letter 
to the lord mayor, begging him to excuse Mr. Sheriff Wilkes 
from taking part in a "vain parade" on the anniversary of 
the accession of a prince who would not redress the griev- 
ances of his subjects ; an act of self-denial which, as the au- 
stere tribune remarked, dispensed him from "going in a ginger- 
bread chariot to yawn through a dull sermon at St. Paul's." ' 

Quite unmoved by the vague and vast expectations and 
alarms which he excited in every class of mind and every 
grade of society, Wilkes kept steadily in sight, and continued 
patiently to pursue, his own modest but very definite ambitions. 
Whoever liked might regard him as the chosen instrument for 
humbling the Crown and purging the House of Commons; 
but seven years of fighting against almost overwhelming odds 
had produced the same cooling effect upon his pugnacity as 
on that of Frederic the Great. lie had no notion of risking 
his neck, his liberty, or even his leisure in tilting at abuses 
which concerned his neighbors every bit as much as himself ; 
but he was at least as thoroughly determined never to re- 
nounce the modicum of personal success and advantage wdiich 
he believed to be his due. Before he died he meant to be 
acknowledged as member for Middlesex ; and till he died he 
looked to getting his fair share in the good things of the only 
world about which he interested himself, for his indifference 
to the next may be estimated by his boast that he had been 
his own chaplain since Churchiirs death.^ When his term of 

' Junius shows poorly iu his private communications to Wilkes. The 
want of native humor which was at the root of his very serious literary 
faults, but which is concealed by the elaborate ornamentation of his pub- 
lic writings, is constantly visible when he is off his guard. His letters 
of advice are at times pompous to fatuity, and always dreadfully dull. 
Though Wilkes did his utmost to be civil, it is evident that he soon had 
enough of the correspondence. 

^ It was Wilkes's fortune to exercise a remarkable fascination over cele- 
brated young clergymen who ended by unfrocking themselves. Churchill 
was ah'cady devoted to him at the jieriod when, as he writes, 

" I kept those sheep, 
Which for my curse I was ordained to keeji 



236 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

imprisonment was over, lie took his place among his fellow- 
citizens as unostentatiously as their ardor and devotion would 
allow, and as silently as was permissible without exposing him- 
self to the charge of surliness or ingratitude. Shunning the 
perilous display of a public meeting, he employed his pen to 
thank, in two manly and spirited addresses, the county which 
had done its best to make him a member of Parliament, and 
the ward which had made him an alderman. His municipal 
duties could not be performed except in person ; and for weeks 
and months to come, whenever he appeared in Guildhall or 
at the Mansion House, his worse than plain features were 
rapturously gazed at by crowds as large as ever went to see a 
Miss Gunning married. "I find," he wrote to his daughter, 
" going about not a little troublesome, from the too great par- 
tiality of my countrymen." Indeed, it was for his daughter's 
sake that he chiefly valued a popularity the evidences of which 
he communicated to her by letter as regularly and faithfully 
as he divided with her the tribute in money and in kind that 
flowed in upon him from every quarter. Just as he put aside 
for his Polly the pineapple out of a hamper of fruit, and the 
salmon-trout out of a basket of fish, and the four " exquisitely 
beautiful perroquets" that had come by coach from Ports- 
mouth, so he never failed to let her know, with a copious mi- 
nuteness which in a lazy correspondent is the surest proof of 
affection, how he had been cheered and mobbed and stared 
at ; how the ladies at the assembly-rooms pulled caps to dance 
with him ; how, when he went into the Eastern counties on 
business, the provincial enthusiasm and curiosity turned what 
he intended»to be a quiet jaunt into something only less noisy 
and fatiguing than a royal progress ; how, when he visited Cam- 
britlge for his amusement, he was received both by town and 
gown as respectfully as if he had been a famous foreign gen- 
eral, and much more respectfully than if he had been an emi- 

(Ordainecl, alas ! to keep through need, not choice), 
Those sheep which never heard their shepherd's voice; 
Which did not know, yet would not learn, their waj^; 
Which strayed tliemselves, yet grieved that I should stray." 



1770.] CIIAllLES JAMES FOX. 237 

iient foreign scholar ;' liow tlie electors of Westminster had 
crone like one man for a candidate who had no other .claim on 
their suffrages except that he was an enemy of Sandwich, who 
was an enemy of Wilkes ; how the new lord mayor was a 
Wilkite, and the new city member, and both the new sheriffs ; 
and how, when he himself was sworn in as alderman, his Tory 
colleagues gave him the hearty welcome which so convivial a 
fraternity could not refuse to the pleasantest fellow in Eng- 
land. 

He was chosen sheriff in 1771,' and in 1775 the news of his 



1 The people followed Wilkes about the colleges " in great crowds, 
with prodigious acclamations." In Trinity Chapel, on the Sunday even- 
ing, the anthem was from the 116th Psalm: "I am well pleased that the 
Lord hath heard the voice of my prayer." One of the many young 
Whi"-s wdio sat whispering there in their surplices came up to Wilkes, 
and,°saying with emphasis, " I am well pleased," presented him with a 
book of anUiems ; " which," says Wilkes, " I gave to a pretty woman near 



me. 



It was the same in the West of England. More than two years after 
he had come out of prison, as lie was yachting along the Dorsetshire 
coast, he put into Swanage, and was greeted with all the honors which 
that " rascally dirty little town," as he ungratefully calls it, could pay 
him. He next went on shore at Brixham, and found the population of 
the neighborhood " very stanch to the cause of liberty," and much edi- 
fied by°the emotion which he exhibited over "the sacred spot where 
King William landed to rescue a wretched people from slavery and the 
Stuarts." 

» At the election of sheriffs the Court made a last attempt to molest 
Wilkes by supporting a pair of candidates against him and his nominee. 
Incited by the king, who assured him that Wilkes had been "in his vari- 
ous struggles supported by a small though desperate part of the Livery, 
while the sober and major part of that body for fear kept aloof," Lord 
North sent word to Mr. Benjamin Smith, a leading ministerialist in the 
East end, that the cabinet expected all its friends to be on the alert till 
the poll was over. The letter was carried to the wrong Benjamin Smith, 
who, with the smartness of a true Wilkite, published it without any com- 
ment beyond an affidavit of its authenticity; and the only effect of the 
government's interference was to make Wilkes doubly sure, and to bring 
his man of straw in wuth him. 

By 1771 the alienation between the government and the City had be- 
come proverbial. One of the characters in the " IMaid of Bath," which 



238 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

elevation to the office of lord major excited a profound emo- 
tion among politicians on tlie Continent; but Wilkes meas- 
ured the worth of what he had gained more jnstly than the 
circle of famous authors and philosophers who discussed his 
rising greatness across Baron d'Holbach's table with a friendly 
interest not untinged by awe. He was gratified at hearing 
Miss Wilkes universally commended as the best lady mayoress 
that liad ever done the honors of the Mansion House ; but to 
himself his civic dignities were weary, flat, and, above all, un- 
profitable. To spend his mornings with the paving commis- 
sioners and his afternoons on the bench, until his days, ac- 
cording to his own somewhat profane expression, seemed as 
long as those in the last chapter of Daniel ; to desert his roses 
at Fulham, or the book-shelves in his pleasant study near the 
Birdcage Walk, in order to cruise up and down the river in 
the City barge, exchanging dinners with the corporation of 
Rochester, and acting as toast-master till two in the morning 
at a board from which, by way of evincing a patriotic dislike 
of everything that was French, he had banished the only 
liquor that he really loved — were inflictions which it required 
nothing less than a handsome and a permanent salary to sweet- 
en. At length, after a few more years of barren and irksome 
notoriety, he lighted upon a comfortable anchorage wdiere he 
could ride securely after the storms of life. In 1779 the 
chamberlain of London died, and the people, whom Wilkes 
had so bravely and faithfully served, were proud of having a 
post in their gift as lucrative as anything which could have 
fallen to his lot if he had begun his public career by writing 
up Bute, and had ended it by writing down Chatham. The 
Liverymen hastened to install their old favorite in a situation 
which exactly suited his necessities and his tastes. His most 
important function was to deliver neat little harangues, of 
which he enjoyed the composition and certainly did not un- 
dervalue the merits, addressed to those successful M'arriors and 

wfis first played in that year, expresses the idea of absolute impossil)ility 
by the phrase " You might as well expect a minister of state at the Man- 
sion House." 



1770.] CILVRLES JAMES FOX. 239 

statesmen who from time to time were invested with the free- 
dom of the city. He more than once had occasion to smile 
complacently when blnff seamen, fresh from exchanging broad- 
sides with the French Eepublicr.ns or scrambling through the 
quarter-gallery window of a Spanish three-decker, reminded 
him, while acknowledging his compliments, that they, had 
drawn their swords for the best of kings as well as for the 
most perfect and glorious of constitutions. His official emolu- 
ments, which were out of all proportion to his duties, enabled 
him to live with ease and style, and to keep as much ahead of 
the constable as his very unambitious standard of solvency de- 
manded. He divided his year between a mansion in Grosve- 
nor Square and a cottage in the Isle of Wight with a " Tus- 
can room " dedicated to Fortuna Redux, an inscription to the 
filial piety of Miss Wilkes, and a Doric column commemora- 
tive of Churchill in the shrubbery. In this "villakin" he 
lounged away his summers, for the most part alone with a 
daughter who returned the passionate affection which he lav- 
ished upon her, and who was quite capable of appreciating 
the attractions of his inimitable talk, which was none the 
worse for having been scrupulously expurgated for her bene- 
fit. He excused himself from any exertion less gentle than 
that of occasionally reprinting for private circulation a classical 
author, the accuracy of whose text he had established by the 
facile process of collating previous editions; and to such a 
point did he carry his economy of labor that he sent his Greek 
from the press without accents — a piece of literary audacity 
which, to the academic mind, is a stronger proof of his courage 
even than the prefatory remarks on the letter of Lord Wey- 
mouth. But, at whatever value Brunck or Porson might rate 
his contributions to learning, a fine vellum copy of his Ca- 
tullus or his Theophrastus was an acceptable offering to po- 
litical opponents who were half ashamed of the part they had 
taken against him, and impatient at being excluded from the 
privilege of listening to conversation the peculiar charm and 
relish of which no good judge butWalpole ever questioned.' 

' " Wilkes is here," wrote "Walpole from Paris iu 1765, " and has been 



240 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

Lord Mansfield, who had long been saying behind his back 
that Mr. Wilkes was the politest of gentlemen, the best of 
scholars, and the pleasantest of companions, was glad of the 
opportunity of congratulating him to his face upon the ele- 
gance of the amusements which beguiled his leisure. The first 
amicable interview between the authors of the North Briton 
and of tlie" False Alarm" forms the most entertaining page 
in the most entertaining of books.^ It is not on record that 
Wilkes was ever again in a room with Sandwich, though there 
is reason to believe that, in the sublimity of his good-nature, 
he would have made no objection to a meeting, the account 
of which would have thrown into the shade even the dinner 
at Mr. Dilly's. Reconciled to every reputable opponent, from 
the king downwards, he lived disliked by no one, and respect- 
ed after a fashion by most, until, at the close of 1797, he died 
at the canonical age of threescore years and ten. 

The main object of his life had long ere that been attained. 

twice to see me iu my illness. He was very civil, but I cannot say enter- 
tained me much. I saw no wit. He has certainly one merit. Notwith- 
standing the bitterness of his pen, he has no rancor — not even against 
Sandwich, of whom he talked with temper." Gibbon, on the other hand, 
who, in early days, had dined with Wilkes in the character of a brother- 
officer of militia, declared that he scarcely ever met a better companion, 
and recognized in him " inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humor, and 
a great deal of knowledge;" and Voltaire testified to his social qualifica- 
tions in terms at least as high as those employed by Gibbon. " Noth- 
ing," said Mrs. Thrale, iu Miss Burney's presence, " is so fatiguing as the 
life of a wit. Garrick and Wilkes are the two oldest men of their ages 
I know ; for they have both worn themselves by being eternally on the 
rack to give entertainment to others." " David," said Johnson, putting 
the lady's remark into the shortest compass, " looks much older than he 
is ; for his fxce has had double the business of any other man's." 

' It was on a subsequent occasion that Johnson proved himself worthy 
of the best chance that the fortune of talk ever threw iu his way. Wilkes 
had suggested that the House of Commons, in the teeth of an inconven- 
ient statute, might order the pay of the army in America to be remitted 
in English money. " Sure, sir," said Johnson, " you don't think a resolu- 
tion of the House of Commons equal to the law of the land." AVilkes 
lowered his arms at once, and wisely contented himself with ejaculating, 
" God forbid !" 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 241 

ITc left prison fully resolved not to desist until he had estab- 
lished the principle that the choice of the people was never to 
be set aside in deference to monarch or minister, and that the 
representatives of the nation were to be elected at the polling- 
booth, and not inside the House of Commons. That principle, 
which the debates of 1770 had left in the shape of a proposi- 
tion, he intended, before Lord North had done with him, to 
place high on the list of constitutional axioms; but what he 
proposed to effect for the public advantage was to be done at 
his own time and in his own way. His partisans urged him 
to assert his rights, even at the expense of a scene in Parlia- 
ment and a revolution in the country. lie, however, accord- 
ing to the saying of a book which he consulted more fre- 
quently for quotation than for edification, knew that his 
strength lay in sitting still. If the British Constitution was 
to stand, the world had nothing for it but to come round to 
him at last. " I have not," he wrote to his daughter in May, 
1770, " been at either House, to avoid every pretence of a riot, 
or influencing their debates by a mob." He refused to con- 
vert a grave and weighty political ceremony into a personal 
insult to his sovereign by making one in the procession of 
aldermen who carried their periodical remonstrance to St. 
James's. He was not used, he said, to go into any gentleman's 
house who did not wish to see him. His forbearance was re- 
warded when Beckford (taking a course not more unprece- 
dented and informal than the proceedings by which the cabi- 
net had provoked him, as the representative of an injured 
people, to break through the well-founded etiquette of the 
palace) told his Majesty the wholesome truth in words as 
plain and free as ever one honest man used to another — words 
wdiich the citizens of London may still read with profit be- 
neath the statue of their great lord mayor in the Guildhall. 
It was the spirit of Old England, cried Chatham, which spoke 
on that never-to-be-forgotten day. 

AYith the moral triumph on his side, Wilkes could afford to 
wait. At the commencement of each session the sheriffs, bet- 
ter AYilkites than himself, summoned him to appear in Parlia- 
ment as member for Middlesex ; but he remained quietly at 

16 



242 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VI. 

home M'liile Luttrell, as was said with wit that had a serious 
political meaning behind it, continued to vote, like a good 
representative, in strict conformity with the views of his con- 
stituents ; that is to say, with the views of the majority of the 
House of Commons. At the general election of 1774 the in- 
truder abandoned his untenable position ; no other govern- 
ment candidate was put in nomination at Brentford ; and Ser- 
geant Glynn and his patron were returned unopposed. The 
ministers came back from the country with a stronger follow- 
ing than ever ; but, with Massachusetts in a flame, they did 
not care to rake up the embers in Middlesex, and, with silent 
prudence, they allowed Wilkes to take his seat in peace. 
Thenceforward, as long as he cared to be their member, the 
freeholders sent him back to each successive Parliament, 
without the trouble of a contest,' and, for the most part, ac- 
companied by any colleague whom he chose to name. ISTo 
lapse of time, no difference of opinion on the public questions 
of the day, could detach their loyalty from the man with 
whom their own liberties and the honor of their county were 
identified. Years rolled on, and every year did something to 
bring into deeper discredit the system of government that 
began with Bute. The policy of which Wilkes was the ear- 
liest victim had at length conducted the whole nation from 
the summit of glory and prosperity, through the depths of 
humiliation, to the very brink of ruin; and on the third of 
May, 1782, he rose to tell before a sympathetic audience his 
own version of his oft-told story, and to move that the resolu- 
tion of the seventeenth of February, 1769, which declared 
him incapable of being elected a member of Parliament 
should be expunged from the journals of the House of Com- 
mons. Charles Fox, who then long had been, and was still 
for a short while to continue, without a rival in that assembly, 
thought it incumbent on him to pay a tribute to political con- 



' The opposition at the contested election of 1784 was not directed 
against Wilkes. Even while his party lay j^i'ostrate beneath the load of 
unpopularity which crushed the Coalition Ministry, his seat was never 
for a moment in dansrer. 



1770.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. SttS 

sistency iu the sliape of a dry and perfunctory counter-argu- 
ment, very different from the rattling invectives by wliich, 
twelve years back, he had thrown the ministerial benches into 
a ferment, and turned the tables upon speakers who had been 
parliamentary authorities before he was born or thought of. 
Fox did not succeed in averting a decision in which he was 
prepared beforehand to acquiesce. The resolution w\as an- 
nulled by a majority pretty. nearly in proportion to that which 
had originally carried it ;* and then, going beyond what Wilkes 
thought his due, the House, without a single dissentient voice, 
ordered its clerk to remove from its records all traces what- 
soever of its own arbitrary proceedings in the past, " as being 
subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors of this 
kingdom." 

Historians have been blamed for giving too much of their 
space to Wilkes, and to tlie cause which he almost reluctantly 
represented ; but it is difficult to say what other method could 
be pursued, if it be the aim of history to relate the events 
which filled the minds of people in days gone by in such a 
manner as to strike the minds of people in the present. The 
most random excursion or the most patient and diligent re- 
search into the literature of the eighteenth century will alike 
confirm the truth of a remark made by a contemporary an- 
nalist of no mean authority, who pronounced that no public 
measure since the succession of the Brunswicks had caused 
"so general an alarm and so universal a discontent" as the 
foisting of Colonel Luttrell upon an unwilling constituency." 
As to the legality or wisdom of that step, there has ceased to 
be any diversity of judgment whatsoever. "I have constantly 
observed," wrote Burke, when the quarrel was at its hottest, 
" that the generality of people are at least fifty years behind- 
hand in their politics. Men are wise with but little reflection, 
and good with little self-denial, in the business of all times 

* The famous resolution had been carried in 1769 by 235 votes to 89, 
and was annulled in 1782 by 115 votes to 47. 

^ This observation occurs on page 68 of the "Annual Register" for 
1769. The passage was probably written, and undoubtedly revised, by 
Burke. 



244 TPIE EARLY HISTOKY OF [Chap. VI. 

except tlieir own. Few are the partisans of departed tyranny. 
I believe there was no professed admirer of Henry the Eighth 
among the instruments of the last King James ; nor in the 
court of Henry the Eighth was there, I dare say, to be found 
a single advocate for the favorites of Richard the Second." 
It did not take fifty years to fulfil this prophecy, so subtly 
couched in the form of an historical generalization. Long 
before that term had elapsed, politicians who were opposing 
reforms which Richmond and Rockingham would have pro- 
moted, and walking through lobbies in which Burke and 
Savile would never have been found, were one and all for- 
ward in protesting that, if they had been born a generation 
earlier, they would have spoken and voted with the Whigs at 
every point of the dispute about the Middlesex election. 



CiiAr.VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 245 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Favorable Conditions for taking Rank as an Orator under wliicli 
Fox entered Parliament. — His Early Career.— He becomes a Junior 
Lord of the Admiralty. — His Father's Pride and Pleasure. — Lord Hol- 
land's Unpopularity. — The Balances of the Pay-office. — ^Lord Holland's 
Indulgence towards his Children. — King's Gate. — Charles Fox and 
his Studies. — His Passion for Poetry. — Naples. — Paris. — Intimate Re- 
lations between the Good Society of France and England. — Shopping 
in Paris. — Intellectual Commerce between the Two Countries. — Feel- 
ings of Fox towards France. — Madame du Detfand. — Fitzpatrick. — 
Mrs. Crewe. — Private Theatricals. — Eifect of his Stage Experience on 
Fox's Speaking. 

If the main end of public life is to liold power as a minis- 
ter, Charles Fox was of all statesmen the most nnfortunate; 
but, as though in comjDensation for the ill-luck that awaited 
liim, the circumstances of his earlj career could not have been 
more favorably arranged for the purpose of educating him 
into an orator. The peculiar temptations of the House of 
Commons are seldom understood outside its walls; and of all 
those temptations the most irresistible is that which invites a 
speaker, who is still on his promotion, to acquire the fatal 
habit of flattering his audience. Lofty sentiments arrayed in 
burning words, stern truths embellished, but not concealed, by 
the ornaments of language, and all else that constitutes high 
and genuine eloquence, are not expected, and if forthcoming 
are seldom readily accepted, from those who are not already 
in possession of what in homely phrase is known as the ear of 
the House ; and an aspirant very soon discovers that the short- 
est and- surest method of gaining the ear of the House is to say 
what pleases the most numerous section of its members. And 
so it often happens that a politician who begins by speaking 
in manly and faithful obedience to his own beliefs and aspi- 
rations gradually learns the art of reserving himself for occa- 



246 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

sions when tliose beliefs happen to coincide with the views, or, 
it may be, the prejudices, of the assembly which he addresses ; 
forgetting, until it is too late, that he purchases each succes- 
sive ovation at the expense of the unflinching sincerity which 
is the soul of true oratory. 

But with Charles Fox, most happily for himself and his 
countrymen, the process was exactly reversed. Before his 
character was formed ; before the party with W'hich he w\as 
to act was deliberately and finally chosen ; before, it may al- 
most be said, he was old enough to have opinions at all ; he 
found himself in complete accord with all that was most vio- 
lent in the passions whigh swayed the majorit}^ of his parlia- 
mentary colleagues, but wdiich were shared by few of the 
ablest, and none of the most earnest, statesmen of the day. 
With nobody better than Bigby and Sir Fletcher Norton to 
oppose to Burke and Wedderburn, the ministerialists wanted 
a spokesman, while Fox was looking about for a topic ; and^ 
thus it came to pass that, with unexampled rapidity, he shot 
straight to the front, and acquired the confidence which em- 
boldened him freely to speak his mind, and the authority 
which secured him a hearing. And then, when his position 
was established — when he had begun to think for himself, 
with the certainty that the world would listen eagerly and re- 
spectfully to the result of his refiections — there was presented 
to him as fertile and elevated a theme as ever called forth the 
powers of an orator; and during eight years of a ceaseless 
and arduous struggle against the folly of tliose who first in- 
sisted on provoking, and then persisted in fighting, America, 
he nobly justified the reputation that he had cheaply won by 
his panegyrics on Luttrell and his denunciations of Wilkes. 

But those eight years were preceded by four others during 
which the public doings of Charles Fox were of a nature to 
afford more amusement than profit to the student of parlia- 
mentary history. His political as well as his moral wild oats 
were still to sow ; and he set himself to the business of scat- 
tering them broadcast with a profusion that has rarely been 
ecpialled in the case of the latter species, and never in that of 
the former. AVith the levity of a schoolboy, the self-reliance 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 247 

of an cx-prime-iniiiister, and a debating faculty which might 
be put to better uses, but could not possibl}^ become sharper 
or swifter than it was already, no portent at once so formida- 
ble and so unaccountable had hitherto been witnessed in St. 
Stephen's. The noble lord who steered the ship of the state, 
and whose scientific calculations were grievously disturbed by 
the vagaries of such a meteor, was indefatigable, as long as he 
had any hope of success, in inducing it to take and keep a 
place among the fixed constellations. It was evident that 
something would have to be found for a young gentleman 
who, according to his own account in later days, was on his 
legs at least once every evening, and who, by the confession 
of others, never sat down without having left his mark upon 
the discussion. At length, on the nineteenth of February, 
1770, when many hours had been spent in threshing out a 
question of unusual intricacy connected with the Middlesex 
election, Wedderburn, by a singularly ingenious and well- 
timed argument, had convinced even his oj^ponents that there 
was no precedent for the course recommended by the govern- 
ment, in a matter where precedent was everything; and hon- 
orable members were just settling down to the disagreeable 
conviction that they would have to vote against their common- 
sense, or see their party defeated, when Charles Fox started 
up, and produced a case in point so apt and recent as entirely 
to cut the ground from under Wedderburn. The House 
" roared with applause ;" the king, delighted by a majority 
which exceeded his most sanguine expectations, begged the 
prime-minister to give him the particulars of a debate which 
had been crowned by so brilliant a victory ; and, on the very 
day after his Majesty had heard Lord North's report of what 
had passed, a new writ was moved for the borough of Mid- 
hurst in consequence of Mr. Charles Fox having been ajjpoint- 
ed a junior lord of the Admiralt3\* 

' Fox's patent as Lord of the Admiralty was made out on the twenty- 
eighth of February, 1770. Walpole makes Fox confute Wedderburn on 
the twenty-fifth of January; but a careful comparison of his narrative 
with reports of the debates of the twenty-fifth of January and the nine- 
teenth of February proves almost to certainty that he confused the dates. 



248 THE EARLY HISTORY OE [Chap. VII. 

It is easy to imagine the feelings with which Lord Holland 
watched the son of his hopes, while not yet of age, fighting 
his way towards the enchanted portals of office, and then 
reaching out his hand to receive a prize which came only jnst 
too late to be a birthday present. The father's letters abound 
in expressions of satisfaction so hearty and affectionate as to 
awaken in the reader an evanescent sympathy even for the 
doleful dissertations on the guile and ingratitude of mankind 
with which those letters are plentifully interlarded. " The 
newspapers, I am told, have forgot me;" so the old gentle- 
man writes to Selwyn from Nice, in February, 1770. " You, 
I see, remember me. The excessive fine weather we have 
here, and Charles's fame, have certainly for some days past 
made my spirits better than they had been since I saw you ; 
and yet the man I envy most is the late lord chamberlain, 
for he is dead, and he died suddenly. If that dog Beckford 
should be dead, I must not envy him;" and the writer then 
proceeds to put forward, as the ground on which he for- 
bore to envy Beckford, certain gloomy probabilities which, 
when his own death occurred, it is to be feared that many 
were uncharitable enough to give as their reason for not en- 
vying Lord Holland. " I told you," he says again, " that 
Charles's fame had made Lady Holland more curious about 
polities. I would not give twopence for some people's opin- 
ion ; but what I wish most to hear is Charles's of his own 
speaking." " Your panegyric upon Cliarles," so runs another 
passage, " came about an hour after I wrote mine. He writes 
word that upon February the twelfth he spoke very ill. I do 
not mind that ; and when he speaks so well as to be, as Lady 
Mary says,' the wonder of the age, it does not give me so much 
pleasure as what you, very justly, I think, tell me de son cmur. 

By this time Walpole was no longer in Padiameut, and got his House of 
Commons information at second-hand. 

' Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, daughter of the first Eai-1 of Upper Ossory, 
married Stephen Fox in 1766, and died four years after him, in 1778. 
Her own letters, and every allusion made to her in the letters of others, 
indicate that she was such a woman as all who knew tlie third Lord Hol- 
land would suppose his mother to have been. 



CiiAV. VII.] CIIxVRLES JAMES FOX. 249 

And yet that may not signify ; for, if I know myself, I have 
been honest and good-natured ; nor can I repent of it, though 
convinced now tliat honesty is not the best policy, and that 
good-nature does not meet with the return it ought to do." 

Lord Holland's predictions witli regard to Beckford's future, 
and his lamentations over his own ill-requited virtue, had their 
origin from one and the same source. He had of late been 
much exercised by the conduct of certain officious individuals 
"who had tlireatened him with the bailiffs in order to force him 
to explain what he was doing with the large suras of public 
money that still remained in his hands ; and he was yet more 
seriously disturbed when Beckford, as Lord Mayor of London, 
presented the king with a petition from the City which, after 
bringing a long series of elaborate accusations against the 
ministry, disposed of the ex-paymaster in a single half-sen- 
tence as " the public defaulter of unaccounted millions." If 
he had been still in active political employment, the old states- 
man would not have given the charge a moment's thought; 
but he was not exempt from that retrospective sensitiveness 
which is generally observable in men of ambition and energy 
who have been elbowed out of the game, and reduced to live 
on the reminiscences of their own past. After a corresp>ond- 
ence with Beckford, maintained on his side in a tone rather 
plaintive and indignant, Lord Holland published a statement 
which proved incontestably that the procrastination in making 
lip his books and paying in his balances, with which he had 
been taunted as a crime, was neither illegal nor unusual. But 
in defending himself he laid bare the abuses of a system 
which might well make an economist shudder ; for his memo- 
randum disclosed the extraordinary fact that the country did 
not clear accounts with the chief of all its financial ao;ents un- 
til those accounts were at least half a generation in arrear. 
The accounts of the regiments that fought for George the 
Second at Dettingen and Culloden were only declared a few 
months before George the Third ascended the throne. The 
accounts of the regiments that had been disbanded after the 
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle during the summer of 1748 had not 
been declared at the time that Lord Holland was writing his 



250 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Cilvp. VII. 

exculpation in the summer of 1769. It was therefore unrea- 
sonable to call hard names, and set the sheriff's officer to 
work, because the accounts of the regiments which had se- 
cured America to the British Crown at Quebec would in all 
likelihood be still unsettled when Lord North and his royal 
master had succeeded in losing the best part of what Wolfe 
had conquered. But, having made out that part of the case 
which told in his favor, the calumniated administrator did not 
think it necessary to remind the tax-payers that every month 
during which the audit was postponed brought into his pocket 
large emoluments, such as, even in his own day, men of del- 
icacy scrupled, and high-minded men flatly refused, to take. 
It was frequently asserted in print, and has never been con- 
tradicted, that, to say nothing of what he gained as paymas- 
ter, the interest on the balances which were outstanding after 
he left office made Lord Holland and Lord Holland's family 
richer by a quarter of a million pounds; not one half-penny 
of which Chatham would have condescended to touch before 
him, or Burke after him.' 

' Proceedings against the ex-paymaster had been actually commenced 
in the Court of Exchequer, and were only stayed by a warrant from the 
Crown. Lord Holland addressed a pathetic, if rather irregular, commu- 
nication to Baron Smith, who may probably have been the judge before 
whom his cause was to come on for trial. " To be made," he wrote, " so 
miserable by the undeserved abuse I meet with, your lordship says is 
weakness. But if my being held up to all England as one of the great- 
est rascals in it should incline Mr. Baron Smith to think me so, your lord- 
ship cannot blame me if I wish he were set right. Indeed, my lord, it is 
impossible to be more blameless in that article upon which Mr. Horn, 
Mr. Beckford, every newsjiaper, and all England have accused me. Mr. 
"\Vinnington''s executors were near twenty years before he could pass his 
accounts. Mr. Pitt was fourteen years before he could pass his. My 
Lord Kiunoul was twelve yeai's, though he had but two years' accounts 
to pass. Is it not natural to suppose that the difficulty is in the nature 
of things, and no fault of the paymaster, and this cruel abuse of me is 
really for not being forwarder by ten years than anybody else was? 
Don't let Baron Smith, who, I hear, is a worthy man, censure me for what 
I cannot help, and let him know to what an infinite degree, and your 
lordship would say sillily, I feel the abuse that I meet with. Charles is 
my secretary ; so nobody else will know that I trouble you with this." 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 251 

Lord Holland had some excuse for exclaiming against the 
injustice of an unpopularity which time did not mitigate, and 
wliich followed him into the seclusion where a disgraced min- 
ister has the right to look at least for safety. When he appeal- 
ed from the relentless hatred with which he was regarded by 
people who had never seen him except through the window 
of his coach, to the devoted affection which he obtained from 
those who M^ere with him the most, and who knew him the 
best, he can hardly be blamed for esteeming himself a misun- 
derstood man. While the City was still demanding his im- 
peachment as vociferously as it had demanded the impeach- 
ment of Bolingbroke and Oxford within a month of their fall ; 
while satirists were reproaching Charles Fox on his parentage 
with a ferocity which might have scared a more timid parlia- 
mentary novice and alienated a less loving son' — all was well, 
or, at any rate, well enough for Lord Holland, in the home 
where he sought for the repose and happiness that were de- 
nied him elsewhere. It is no wonder that he was endeared to 
all who were dependent upon him for their welfare and con- 
tentment. " He had that temper which kind folks have been 
pleased to say belongs to our family." Such was the testi- 
mony of his grandson ; and, over and above the Fox temper. 
Lord Holland was largely endowed with the Fox tact. Like 
all who bore a name which the language of society has raised 
to the dignity of a laudatory epithet, he was entirely free from 
prosiness and pretension, and from that ambition in small 
things which will make cleverness tiresome, and render even 
genius a disagreeable inmate in a household. Those very 
qualities which have earned him a black mark in history had 
their amiable side when viewed from within his own doors, 
and contributed to the domestic comfort, if not to the moral 



' " Welcome, hereditary worth ! 

No doubt, no blush, belies thy birth, 
Prone as the infernal fiends to evil. 
If that black face and that black heart 
Be not old Holland's counterpart, 
Holland himself 's unlike the devil." 
Ode to St. Stephen (in " The Foundling for Wit" of 1772). 



252 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

advantage, of himself and of those with whom and for whom 
he lived. The cynical indifference to the character of his in- 
struments and his allies, which had done so much to discredit 
him as a statesman, took within the precincts of Holland 
House the form of an inexhaustible tolerance which exceeds 
all recorded instances of paternal facility. He was not the 
father to quarrel with his children for being what his own care- 
lessness had made them.' He asked, as he had a right to ask, 
that they should give him their confidence ; that they should 
be at ease in his presence, and fight his battles behind his 
back ; that they should share with him some of their innu- 
merable enjoyments, and sympathize to a reasonable extent 
with his richly merited grievances. But he asked nothing 
more. As long as Charles would treat him like an elder 
brother (a point on which the lad indulged him without in- 
fringing on the strictest filial respect, or abating an atom of 
that eager and minute dutifiilnoss which he exhibited in all 
his personal relations), he was Avelcome to do as he pleased 
witli his own time and with Lord Holland's money. He 
might be the talk of London and of Paris for his irregulari- 
ties and extravagances ; he might stuff every bill-case in the 
Minories with his acceptances, and lose in a night the proc- 
eeds of a twelvemonth's jobbery at the Pay-office ; he might 
fling away his unequalled political chances in the wantonness 
of every passing impulse — if only he would write to his father 
as he wrote to George Selwyn, and talk to him as he talked 
to Lord Carlisle; if only he would spare him an evening in 
the week to discuss the odds at Newmarket, and laugh over 
the faces which were pulled on the Treasury bench when the 
Junior Lord of the Admiralty committed ministers to a policy 
of which they heard for the first time from the young gentle- 
man's lips, or when he fell tooth and nail on the attorn ey- 

' "Who ever bad cbildren," he wrote to an old friend, "that do not, 
when they are young men, do what their father had rather they would 
not do ? I have found it, dear Mr. Crawford, in a very essential instance ; 
and, memor ilium piieritm esse, mefuisse, I acted as you do ; and I dare say 
you applaud yourself for the success of your good-natured behavior. I 
do not reo-ret mine." 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 253 

o;eneral with a niutiiions vigor wliieh recalled to the delighted 
sire his own historical onslanght on Lord Ilardwicke's Mar- 
riage Bill. 

The ugliest of all the features in Lord Holland's character 
acc[uired a softer aspect by the light of his own fireside. His 
unsparing and unreasoning generosity to his children, in itself 
another fault, does something to render less odious the rapac- 
ity for which he is proverbially remembered. Without a 
spark of the patriotism which dignified the selfishness of 
Wolsey and the cupidity of Marlborough, he regarded the in- 
terests of the nation much as his namesake in the animal 
world regards the interest of the poultry-yard; but at any 
rate he was not, like the great soldier, actuated by avarice, nor, 
like the churchman, by a passion for personal display. He 
plundered the many, whom he neither hated nor loved, in or- 
der to load with wealth and surfeit with pleasure the few hu- 
man beino;s for whose benefit he would have laid down his life 
as readily and as lightly as he sacrificed his conscience and his 
reputation. When Stephen Fox was affianced to Lord Ossory's 
daughter, his father addressed a striking and pathetic letter to 
the Duke of Bedford, w^hose kinswoman the lady was. " I am 
extremely sensible," he wrote, "of the honor done my son, 
and will contribute (besides dying very soon) to what may 
give the young people great affluence ;" and there was a wish 
as well as a prophecy in that quaint parenthesis. " I will 
come," he added, " into whatever they shall propose." Few, 
even among the class who make the marriage of their children 
an opportunity for buying a step of social promotion, would 
bind themselves beforehand by so liberal a pledge when deal- 
ing with the settlements of their eldest son ; and fewer still, 
at a time of life when all men feel the value of money, except 
those who have never made or kept it, would allow a younger 
son, and such a specimen of a younger son as Charles Fox, to 
treat his father's fortune as his own. 

In February, 1770, that fortune, though not intact, was still 
enormous. AVith all the will in the world, the young man had 
wanted the time to make any serious impression upon the 
mountain of wealth out of which Lord Holland fondly ex- 



254 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

pected to carve him a patrimony greater than was enjoyed by 
half the peerage. The Kensington estate was to go with the 
title ; but Charles was carefully instructed to regard himself 
as the future master of a country retreat which his father 
loved with the absorbing and tenacious affection which he 
cherished towards everything and everybody that he loved at 
all, and on which, fortunately for Holland House, he had con- 
centrated his architectural industry, and tested his theories of 
classical and romantic decoration. At the extreme point of 
the Kentish coast, a little more than half a mile from the 
North Foreland, there runs down to the sea a dell which in 
the days of the Stuarts was secured against smugglers and pri- 
vateers by a rampart and a portcullis. The place owed its 
designation of King's Gate Stairs to a chance visit of Charles 
the Second, who, on his way between London and Dover, once 
passed a few minutes on a spot which was destined to be the 
nursery of an offshoot of royalty whom, both for his merits 
and his failings, the monarch would have been proud to ac- 
knowledge as a descendant. On this site, so exquisitely adapt- 
ed to recall the languors of the Caietan Gulf, Lord Holland 
had built himself a habitation which purported "to represent 
Tully's Formian villa." He fitted up the house with genuine 
antiquities, which soon came to the hammer; and planted the 
whole neighborhood, far and near, with sham castles and ab- 
beys which have since been converted to homely uses, and re- 
christened with still homelier names. King's Gate, in every 
particular, was exactly to its owner's taste. There (an advan- 
tage which, with much reason, he placed foremost among the 
attractions of the home that he had chosen) he could forget 
himself, and hope that he was forgotten by others. There, as 
lie wrote to Lord Shelburne before their quarrel, sea air gave 
him " appetite, sleep, and spirits." There he was " very happy 
and amused with trifles that lead to nothing sad and serious." 
He never tired of riding about the country, directing the 
progress of undertakings that stood him instead of those ru- 
ral occupations which he was too much of a Londoner to ap- 
preciate. While Burke was making money by selling his car- 
rots, and losing it by giving them to his live-stock ; while 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 255 

Chatliam watched his trees with the eye of a woodman, and 
made a shift to keep within hearing of the chase when the 
boys took the field with their harriers — Lord Holland was 
training iv}^ over his turrets and cloisters ; mounting cannons 
along the cliff ; raffling for statues of Flora and Bacchus, and 
busts of Pertinax and Crispina ; excavating burial-mounds ; 
rearing a pillar to commemorate a battle between Danes and 
Saxons which in all likelihood never had been fought; and 
erecting a tower " in the Roman style " in honor of an anti- 
Wilkite lord mayor of London who had probably earned his 
monument by throwing cold water on the demand for an in- 
quiry into the paymaster's accounts.' 

So absorbed had been Lord Holland in the place which he 
was creating that the last and heaviest blow of fortune, his 
ejection from the Pay-office, fell lightly upon him because he 
was at King's Gate when the news arrived. " It comes chiefly, 
I understand, from the Bedf ords," so he wrote to his M'ife ; 
" which is as it should be, for there is not one of them that is 
not greatly obliged to me. Now, my dear Caroline, let us con- 
sider how this affects us. There is an end of every view ; but 
then there is not any we had all set our hearts on. I should 
have liked to be an earl ; but indeed I should be ashamed if 
at my age I could not give up that with the ntmost ease. 
"What, then, have we to regret ? You never thought of a court 

' This edifice, raised, in other than the Koman style, to a height which 
qualifies it to serve as a sea-mark, now goes hj the appellation of " Can- 
dlestick Tower." " My tower in honor of Mr. Harley," wrote Lord Hol- 
land, " is built, I believe, more for my private amusement than from pub- 
lic spirit ; but he is really almost the only man that has not been a cow- 
ard." Lord Holland embodied his gratitude to the Tory lord mayor in 
an inscription drawn from Horace : 

" Justum et tenacem propositi virum 
Non civium ardor prava jubentium 
Mente quatit solida." 

It does not need a very profound scholar to detect the hiatus in tlie stan- 
za, and to understand the reason of it. The same most significant omis- 
sion may be ol^served under a bust of Lord Eldon which has been ban- 
ished into an obscure corner of the Cliauccry offices. 



25G THE ExVKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

life, and neither my health nor age would have admitted of 
politics. It seems, then, tliat this only leads to the life we 
must and should have led. We shall have money enough for 
everything but gaming, and nothing were sufficient for that. 
You'll live at your favorite Holland House a good deal, and 
little more than the four hot montlis will suffice for me here. 
How will it affect the children? I hope not at all. This does 
not hinder Ste from having the world before him. Charles 
will be angry, I believe; but at his age it will do him no 
harm, and he may be the more egged on by it. May I not 
build on him for my hours of comfort ? Harry is too young 
and happy ever to know of this. He is the happiest of mor- 
tals, and gone to show Lords Hchester and Bateman the Mar- 
gate sands, while I am writing in a room prettier than you can 
imagine. Well, Caroline, I don't think you need, or will, turn 
your eyes from this prospect." Three days afterwards he 
wrote : " Harry has a little horse to ride, and his whole stable- 
ful to look after. He lives \vitli the horse ; stinks, talks, and 
thinks perpetually of the stable ; and is not a very good com- 
panion. Now the others are gone, I shall try to make him 
more so. He has just found out that I am turned out, and, you 
may be sure, don't care a fartliing ; but he has been so intent 
upon his horses that though he must have heard it mentioned 
a hundred times since Saturday, it was not to his purpose, and 
he never heeded it. After the stable was shut up last night, 
he came of his own accord, and read very prettily some 
words. We shall be at a loss what to read, I find. I wish 
you could advise." 

This letter was written in May, ITG-i, and twelve years af- 
terwards, unfortunately for his happiness and dignity, Lord 
Holland was still hankering after that step in the peerage 
which he had so confidently professed to have renounced. In 
August, 1YT2, excited at seeing the prize which had so often 
been refused him conferred on two of his brother-barons, he 
commissioned Charles to lay his claims before the prime-min- 
ister. North dared not himself inflict a rebufl: u23on a member 
of Parliament who just at that time was the most formidable 
of free lances ; but the king, who disliked the young orator 



Chap. VII.J CHARLES JAMES FOX. 257 

more than he feared him, sent word " that the door was now 
shut, and that for tlie present no more earldoms would be 
granted." Then, as a last hope. Lord Holland had recourse 
to Bute, and dictated a piteous letter reminding his ancient 
confederate of those services which, if the voice of the coun- 
try had been taken, would have been rewarded by a very dif- 
ferent sort of elevation from that which he coveted.* " Do 
you remember," he asked, "you who never deceived me, 
when 3'ou told me if I asked anything for my children I 
should see the esteem the king had for me ? I see no signs 
of it." Bute replied kindly, but decisively. "The very few 
opportunities I have had for many years," he said, " of being 
of the least service to any person are now at an end. The sad 
event of this fatal year has left me without a single friend 
near the royal person,* and I have taken the only part suited 
to my way of thinking — that of retiring from the world be- 
fore it retires from me." Lord Holland had now nothing for 
it but to follow the advice and example which Bute had given 
him ; and, late and perforce, he sought consolation and em- 
ployment for the evening of life in pursuits more congenial 
to his better nature than an unprofitable and unacceptable at- 
tendance at St. James's. He was, and always had been when 
he cared for it, one of those who had admission to a yet more 
privileged circle. 

" That place that does contain 
]\Iy books, the best companions, is to me 
A glorious court, -where hourly I converse 
With the old sages and philosophers." 



^ Mason, in his " Heroic Epistle," proposed to construct a sort of polit- 
ical Chamber of Horrors, containing a row of scaflblds: 

" On this shall Holland's dying speech be read ; 
Here Bute's confession, and his wooden head. 
"While all the minor plunderers of the age, 
Too numerous for this contracted page. 
The Rigbys, IMungos, and the Bradshaws there 
In straw-stuffed effigy shall kick the air." 

^ The princess-dowager had died in the preceding February. 

17 



258 THE EARLY HISTOKY OF [Chap. VII. 

His letters thenceforward are marked by an unvarying tone 
of serenity and resignation, " I have lost," he writes, " for 
more than three months past every symptom of an asthma, 
every apprehension of a dropsy. My distemper is old age ; 
and, good physician as you are, dear Ellis, you cannot cure me 
of that." " I rise from a very good night," he tells Lady Car- 
oline from King's Gate ; " as mine almost without exception 
have been here. As you truly say, life is only a reprieve." 
"I talk," lie remarks elsewhere, " a good deal of cheerful non- 
sense in a day, and in every day. The truth is that I divert 
myself, yet cannot help thinking very often that it were bet- 
ter it were all over." 

King's Gate is a standing evidence of the faint impression 
which the eighteenth century has left upon the imagination 
of our people. If anything connected with the worthies of the 
Keformation or the heroes of the Long Parliament — anything 
so absolutely unaltered and so intensely characteristic of the 
ideas and manners of the time — stood sixty miles from Lon- 
don, and within a walk of two crowded watering-places, its 
name would be a household word in every educated family of 
the kingdom. And indeed the tourist, as he turns the summit 
of the ascent that is crowned by the IS'orth Foreland light- 
house, wonders for a moment that the striking and singular 
prospect which lies below him should not have taken rank 
among the noted localities of our island. But, as he continues 
to gaze and begins to reflect, he is forced to confess that the 
hand of man has spoiled the desolate grandeur of the scene 
without adding to it the charms of association. The instinct 
of the least practised antiquarian tells him at a second glance 
that the castle, which rears itself in such bold relief against 
the perfect whiteness of the more distant cliff, was planted 
there long since the days when even so unpopular a baron as 
Lord Holland wanted a castle to protect him ; wdiile the Tow- 
er of Neptune, perched on the bastion that guards the other 
flank of the little bay, and the detached fragments of ruin, 
thrown in wherever they are demanded by the principles of 
the picturesque, give to a point of our coast which has some 
claims of its own to be the most famous headland in the world, 
an air of masquerading as the promontory of Sunium. 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 259 

But, as we descend the hill, the absurdities of the higher 
ground are lost to view, and the genuine interest of the spot 
makes itself insensibly and irresisiioiy felt. Lord Holland, 
though bound as a man of taste to erect castles, was far too 
much a man of sense to inhabit them. Right across the mouth 
of the tiny valley, filling it from bank to bank with its square 
main building and formal wings — most conspicuous to sea- 
ward, but curiously invisible from the land — there spreads 
itself an ugly, comfortable mansion which now, together with 
other heterogeneous inmates, lodges a party of coast-guards- 
men and their officer. The glen behind the house runs gradu- 
ally up into the plain, densely overgrown with stunted wind- 
stricken timber, worthless enough to be secure even under 
such a master as Charles Fox ; and in front a platform, fifty 
yards in width, separates the facade from the edge of the cliff, 
which just there is hardly forty feet above the level of the 
beach. The narrow gap in the dwarf jirecipice, which gives 
the place its name, is cut in two by an isolated curtain of 
chalk, of about the height and thickness of a garden wall, 
leaving on either side a passage, in appearance rather a chim- 
ney than a road, which affords a somewhat perilous access to 
the shingle beneath. Other corners of England, and perhaps 
many others, possess reminiscences more inspiring, but none 
more enlivening and authentic. Down that little pathway 
through the chalk has often tripped the heroine of as pleasant 
and innocent a royal romance as any in our history; and, pac- 
ing up and down that strip of gravel, or seated on the sills of 
those unsightly but hospitable windows, lounged and chatted, 
a hundred years ago and more, a group of friends and cousins 
as merry, as affectionate, as easily and, it may be, as inexcusa- 
bly contented with each other and themselves as ever were 
gathered together for Christmas sports and summer idleness 
— a group of which the leader and the idol was the lad who 
already bade fair to be the greatest known nuister of the art 
in which, of all arts, an Englishman covets to excel.' To Lord 



1 " Brougham is quite riglit about Cliarles Fox," said Macaulay. " lie 
was, indeed, a great orator; but then he was the great debater." 



200 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIL 

Holland himself the situation of King's Gate had peculiar ad- 
vantages. It was no slight convenience for an elderly valetu- 
dinarian to embark at his own front door on those foreign 
tours which, since he left office, had become the most advent- 
urous of his enterprises ; and he saved some expense, and 
much risk of irreparable damage, by shipping the Etruscan 
vases and Koman altars, which then were the spoils of travel, 
straight from Leghorn or the Chiaja to his own private land- 
ing-place. " All my things," he says to Charles, in July, 1767, 
"have come from Naples. I shall make King's Gate very 
pretty for you, and have almost fixed upon a plan for a new 
house, where I hope you will spend many happ}'^ hours after I 
am dead and gone. I hope to spend a few with you soon ; 
and, upon my word, I think of none with anything like pleas- 
ure but those I love, and you most sincerely." 

That part of Lord Holland's prayer which related to the 
immediate future was abundantly and agreeably fulfilled. 
Charles, during the seven years that his father still had to 
live, spent at King's Gate many of his most profitable and 
his happiest hours; if, indeed, for such a nature one hour 
could be perceptibly happier than another. Here he laid the 
foundation of his profound and extensive acquaintance with 
history, a department of knowledge in which he was ere long 
reputed to stand on a level with Burke, and (which, indeed, 
was not difficult) to be greatly the superior of Johnson. But 
the spirit in which, while still a colleague of Sandwich and of 
Halifax, Charles Fox imbibed his constitutional learning was 
very different from the spirit in which he was one day to 
utilize it as the vindicator of personal liberty, and the creator 
of our freedom of the press. " I am reading Clarendon," he 
writes from King's Gate to George Selwyn in 1771, "but 
scarcely get on faster than you did with your ' Charles the 
Fifth.' I think the style bad, and that he has a good deal of 
the old woman in his way of thinking, but hate the opposite 
party so much that it gives one a kind of partiality for him :" 
strange words to fall from the pen of one whose bust now 
looks down from beneath the centre of the cornice in half the 
Whig libraries in the kingdom. At King's Gate, too, he con- 



CiiAP. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 2G1 

tinned tliat minute and all-embracing study of the classics 
wliicli enabled him to hold his own, and more than his own, 
with such a bookworm as Gilbert Wakefield on the most deli- 
cate points of scholarship which lurked unsolved in the least 
frequented nooks of ancient literature. One of his favorite, 
and certainly his cheapest, amusements was to turn over Apol- 
lonius Rhodius in search of passages containing hints which 
had been improved upon by greater poets.' And in the very 
lowest depths of his political misfortunes he found consola- 
tion in jesting at his own expense out of the " Cassandra" of 
Lycophron — a work which, in a generation of grammarians 
and commentators who valued books primarily for their ob- 
scurity, had obtained for its author the distinguishing epithet 
of " the obscure." 

But Charles Fox had nothing of a pedant except the ac- 
quirements. His vast and varied mass of erudition, far ex- 
ceeding that of many men who have been famous for nothing 
else, was all aglow with the intense vitality of his eager and 
brilliant intellect. lie trod with a sure step througli the 
treasure-house of antiquity, guided by a keenness of insight 
into the sentiments and the circumstances of the remote past 



* Fox esteemed the " Argonautics " for their owu sake, as well as for the 
obligations under which Ovid and Virgil lay with regard to them. " Your 
notion," he wrote to Wakefield, " in respect to poets borrowing from each 
other seems almost to come up to mine, who have often been laughed at 
by my friends as a systematic defender of plagiarism. I got Lord Hol- 
land, when a schoolboy, to write some verses in jiraise of it ; and, in truth, 
the greatest poets have been most guilty, if guilt there be, in these mat- 
ters. But there are some parts of ApoUonius, such as lib. iii. from 453 
to 463, and from 807 to 816, that aj^pear to me unrivalled." "I looked," 
notes Macaulay, "at these j)assages, and was pleased to find that I had 
marked them both when I read ApoUonius Rhodius at Calcutta. The 
second I had marked exactly to a line." The two Whigs read their 
classics with the same eyes. Macaulay's favorite morsels in Latin were 
the letters in which Cajsar expressed his clemency towards his conquered 
enemies ; and those letters were quite as much to the taste of Fox. When 
the Duke of Enghien was arrested, Fox coi^ied out the Epistle to Oppius, 
with the intention of sending it to Napoleon, but was prevented by the 
arrival of the fatal news. 



262 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

which, in an epoch of criticism far less in sympathy with 
either Athenian or Eoman feeling than our own, amounted to 
little short of positive inspiration. AVith an appetite to wliicli 
notliing came amiss, he possessed a taste that was all but in- 
fallible. He could derive pleasure and profit out of anything 
written in Greek or Latin, from a philippic of Cicero or 
Demosthenes to an excursus by Casaubon ; but he reserved 
his allegiance for the true sovereigns of literature. That 
dramatist who is the special delight of the mature and the 
experienced was his idol from the very first. " Euripides,'' 
he would say, " is the most precious thing left us — the most 
like Shakespeare;" and he knew him as Shakespeare was 
known to Charles Lamb and to Coleridge. " Kead him," he 
enjoined on young Lord Holland, "till you love his very 
faults." He went through the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" 
more than once a year ; and, while he counted every omitted 
digamma, and was always ready to cover four sides of letter- 
paper with a disquisition on Homeric prosody or chronology, 
there is ample proof that, as far as feeling and observation 
were concerned, he had anticipated that exquisite vein of 
criticism which is the special charm of the most charming 
portion of Mr. Euskin's writings." I^ext to Homer among 

^ Casual remarks which might be the text for disquisitions on Homer 
resembling those which help to render the third volume of " Modern 
Painters" incomparable among productions of its class are scattered 
thick through Fox's talk and letters. Ilis notice of the bard's dislike of 
Hercules; of his tenderness to all women except those good-for-nothing 
hussies at the Court of Ithaca who had insulted a better woman than 
themselves ; of the ghastly episode at the Suitors' banquet, where, as he 
truly says, second-sight is treated with a power unrivalled by the poets 
of the country in which that unpleasant gift is supposed to be indige- 
nous ; his observation of the circumstance that Homer never mentions 
the singing of birds, and that Penelojie cannot bring herself to speak of 
Troy or of Ulysses by name — are symptoms indicative of the sjiirit in 
which Fox studied his " Odyssey." When asked the question which all 
literary people have been asking each other since the days of Pisistratus, 
"I would not," he replied, "say I would rather have written the ' Odys- 
sey,' but I know that I would rather read it. I believe it to be the first 
tale in the world." 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 263 

tlie ancients — and even above Homer, at tlie period to which 
this chaptar refers — Fox placed Yirgil, whose pathos (so he 
declared) surpassed that of all poets of every age and nation, 
M'ith the single exception wdiich, as an Englishman with the 
Elizabethan drama at his lingers' ends, he somewhat unwill- 
ingly considered himself bound to make. " It is on that ac- 
count," he continued, " that I rank him so very high ; for 
surely to excel in that style which speaks to the heart is the 
greatest of all excellence." His favorite example of the qual- 
ity that he admired in the "^neid" was the farewell with 
which the aged Evander sent Pallas forth to his last battle. 
The beauty of this i>assage, in his years of vigor, Fox was al- 
ways ready to expound and assert ; and when his time came to 
die, he solemnized his parting with the nephew whom he loved 
as a son by bidding the young man repeat aloud, and then re- 
j)eat once more, lines which, even at a less trying moment, few 
who have ever cried over a book can read without tears.' 

That was the last poetry to which Fox is known to have 
listened ; and the fact is worth recording, because poetry was 
to him what it has been to no one who has ever played a part 
at all comparable to his in the sterner and coarser business of 
the world. Poetry was in his eyes " the great refreshment 
of the human mind," " the only thing after all." It was by 
making and enjoying it that men "first discovered themselves 
to be rational beings;" and even among the Whigs he would 
allow the existence of only one right-thinking politician who 
was not a lover of poetry. Literature was " in every point 
of view a preferable occupation to politics." Statesmanship 
might be a respectable calling; but poetry claimed seven of 
the Muses, and oi'atory none. The poets wrote the best 
prose. The poets had more truth in them than all the his- 
torians and philosophers together. Much as he admired John- 
son's "Lives" (and, except the Church Service, that book was 



' The uncle and nepliew at times almost conversed in Virgil. When 
Fox -was suffering under the dropsy which killed him, Lord Holland 
tried to cheer him with " Dabit Deus his qnoque fincm.'''' " Ay," he re- 
plied, with a faint smile ; " but ' fiueni,' young one, may have two senses." 



26-i THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

the last which was read to him), he never could forgive the 
author for his disloyalty to some among the most eminent of 
his heroes. "His treatment," cried Fox, "of Gray, "Waller, 
and Prior is abominable ; especially of Gray. As for me, I 
love all the poets." And well did they repay his affection. 
They consoled him for having missed everything upon wdiich 
his heart was set, and to the attainment of which the labor of 
his life was directed ; for the loss of power and of fortune ; 
for his all but permanent exclusion from the privilege of serv- 
ing his country and the opportunity of beneliting his friends ; 
even for the extinction of that which Burke, speaking from a 
long and intimate knowledge of his disposition, most correctly 
called " his darling popularity." At the time when, for the 
crime of maintaining that the Revolution of 1G88 had placed 
our Constitution upon a popnlar basis, he had been struck off 
the j)rivy council, and had been threatened with the Tower ; 
when he never went down to Westminster except to be hope- 
lessly outvoted, or looked into a book-shop or print-shop with- 
out seeing himself ferociously lampooned and filthily carica- 
tured, there yet was no more contented man than he through- 
out all that broad England for whose liberties he suffered. 
He could forget tlie insolence of Dundas, and the chicanery 
of Sir John Scott, while intent upon the debate which Belial 
and Mammon conducted in a senate-house less agreeable to 
its inmates even than the House of Commons of 1798 was to 
the Whigs ; and although it was less easy to efface from his 
recollection the miseries which were endured by humbler 
patriots than himself, yet the wrongs of Muir and Palmer 
and Wakefield and Priestley lost something of their sting to 
one who could divert at w^ill the current of his indignation 
against the despot who imprisoned Tasso, and the roisterers 
who affronted Milton. And whenever things were for a mo- 
ment too hard on him — when he returned to his country 
home fretted by injustice and worn by tnrmoil — his wife had 
only to take down a volume of " Don Quixote " or " Gil Bias," 
and read to him nntil his mind was again in tune for the so- 
ciety of Spenser and Metastasio.' 

^ Fox liked one poem of Metastasio as well as anything of the century, 



CiiAP.VIL] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 2G5 

If, at the period when he was the greatest living master of 
the phiin and work-a-day English which Englishmen speak 
over the conduct of their business, he continued to draw his 
inspiration chiefly from the ancient fountains, it is not strange 
that he should have preferred the classics to the moderns dur- 
ing the years when life still appears to its possessor rather a 
romance than a realit}'. And, in truth, he had little choice 
in the matter. It was through no prejudice against his con- 
temporaries that, in his quest of the beautiful and the pa- 
thetic. Fox w^as forced to resort to Chaucer and Dante, and 
Cowley and Filicaja. Unlike some other famous Whigs, he 
carried his Whig principles into his library ; and, while tena- 
cious of all that was worth preserving in the literature of the 
past, he gave every possible proof of his readiness to welcome 
what wa's good in the present. He overrated Anstey. He 
even made the best of Hayley.' He was forever quoting 
frigid passages from Gray, which, if Gray had been dead a 
century, he would assuredly have allowed to slumber in their 
context.'* He tried hard to read Mickle's translation of Ca- 
moens; and when his physical strength was already on the 
turn, he struggled valiantly througli "Madoc ;" though his per- 

and one book of Spenser as well as anything in the world. During a 
single winter, in addition to his daily and almost day-long private 
studies, he read aloud to Mrs. Fox, Tasso, Ariosto, Milton, Spenser, Apol- 
lonius Rhodius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Homer, nine epic poems, according 
to his own count. Two of them, he said, whatever their other merits, 
were far and away the most entertaining — the " Odyssey" and the " Or- 
lando Furioso." 

' " I think," Fox wrote to the third Lord Holland, " that you hold poor 
Hayley too cheap. His ' History of Old Maids,' and parts of the ' Trials 
of Temper,' are, I think, very good." 

^ "His face brightened and his voice rose" as he repeated the descrip- 
tions of nature in Gray's " Fragment on the Alliance of Education and 
Government." But when he came to the point where 

" The blue-eyed myriads from the Baltic coast" 

were cheered on their southward march by the hope soon to " scent the 
fragrance of the breathing rose," the master-gardener of St. Anne's Hill 
could not abstain from remarking that it was rather unlucky for the 
poet that the rose blew in tlie North of Europe. 



266 THE EARLY HISTOEY OF [Chap. VII. 

severance in that case was the less meritorious from Lis being 
under an engagement to his nephew tliat, as soon as he had 
done with Southe}^, he would embark upon the shoreless ocean 
of Lope de Yega.' 

But while Fox was young, not even the generous credulity 
of youth could beguile him into tfie belief that he lived in an 
age of poetry. It was seldom indeed that he then had a 
chance of displaying the discriminating ardor with which, as 
a boy of sixteen, he pounced upon Goldsmith's " Traveller." ^ 
The three great authors who were the delight of what may 
be called his middle period had as yet hardly set foot on the 
lowest slopes of Parnassus. Crabbe was still rolling band- 
ages, and Burns had just been promoted to guide the plough. 
Cowper, deep in the Olney hymns, had at that time published 
nothing to which Fox, whose taste was almost too se'cular for 
"Paradise Regained," would ever have vouchsafed a second 
reading. The dearth of genius in British literature was such 
as to inspire Horace Walpole with the curiously unfortunate 
prophecy that the next Augustan age would dawn on the 
other side of the Atlantic, and that the country which in the 
coming generation was to boast a galaxy of poets which the 
Pome of Maecenas might have envied would have to seek a 
Virgil in New York. It was no wonder that, in order to find 
in the sphere of letters something which answered to his own 
dancing and buoyant conceptions of the universe upon which 

' The young peer had translated some of Lope de Vega, and gave an 
account of liis author which staggered an enthusiast of the drama who 
was not easily frightened. " What can you mean," wrote Fox, "by eigh- 
teen hundred plays of Lope ? Consider, if he was thirty years at it, that 
would make five per month. I shall be very happy if you can spare a 
morning to read with me two or three, for I do not think I shall be equal 
to them myself" Two years afterwards the uncle was still trying to put 
off the evil day. " We have been so occupied with ' Madoc,' " he says, 
" that we have not yet looked at Lope ; but we will begin immediately." 

' " If there were any way of sending you pamphlets," he writes to 
Russia, to George Macartney, in IT60, " I could send you a new poem, 
called the 'Traveller,' which appears to me to have a good deal of 
merit. I do not know anything else that I would advise you to read if 
you were here." 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAIMES FOX. 267 

he had so lately entered, Charles Fox turned from Home's 
" Douglas " and Mason's " Elf ricla " and Glover's " Athenaid " 
to the "Winter's Talc" and the "Maid of Honor," to the 
" Rape of the Lock " and the " Flower and the Leaf." How 
freely he had luxuriated in the poetry of romance during those 
enchanted years when alone the memory retains without an 
effort was known to every visitor at St. Anne's Hill who had 
tried the easy experiment of tempting him from his desk into 
his garden on a June morning. At such a time his compan- 
ion might draw as copiously as he chose (for Fox had too much 
of the orator's half-conscious but ever-present sympathy with 
his hearers to inflict on them an unacceptable syllable) from 
stores of vivid criticism and apt quotation, which sufficed for 
many and many a stroll among his rhododendrons and azaleas 
— past the urn inscribed with the prettiest couplets in the tale 
of Dryden that he loved the best ;' and the mass of laurus- 
tinus embowering the retreat which the most intimate of his 



* " The painted biixls, companions of the spring. 
Hopping from spray to spray, were heard to sing. 
Both eyes and ears received a like delight, 
Enchanting music and a charming sight. 
On Philomel I fixed my whole desire, 
And listened for the queen of all the quire. 
Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing. 
And wanted yet an omen to the spring. 

So sweet, so shrill, so varioiTsly she sung 
That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung." 

The lines are from the " Flower and the Leaf; or, Tlie Lady in the 
Arbor" — a title which must have attracted the tancy of one who was not 
averse to the ladies, and who had probably constructed more arbors than 
any son of Adam. Lord Holland's mania for building had in Charles 
Fox most fortunately taken the shape of a passion for rustic architecture 
on a scale that suited his slender means. He loved temples in gardens 
(so he told Rogers). There was nothing he would like so much as a 
Temple of the Muses; and he wished that anybody (including, and prob- 
ably meaning, Mrs. Fox) would let him build one. Lord Newburgh, he 
said, who had been tlie architect of King's Gate, was a man of great 
taste, and had been good enough to build him a temple. 



268 '^IIl'^ EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

guests respected when he was seated there with Ariosto ; and 
the Temple of Friendship, designed by the same hand which 
had planned the paternal mansion beneath whose roof he had 
begun to amass his treasures of learning and imagination. 

What the reminiscences of King's Gate were to Charles 
Fox could not be better described than in the commencement 
of the fine soliloquy which Cowper puts into the mouth of 
the harassed minister of state, who is perhaps the most power- 
fully drawn of all his characters.' When the great politician 
had grown old enough to feel the weariuess of politics, and 
to understand the craving for 

" that repose 
The servant of the public never knows," 

it must have been with sensations curiously compounded be- 
tween honorable pride and bitter self-rej^roach that he lirst 
perused those touching and forcible lines. Like the states- 
man in the poem, he had cultivated a " taste for ancient song" 
in his father's halls; but there the resemblance stopped. 
Fox never scorned the studies with which he once had been 
familiar, nor lost, by his own neglect, a single friend ; and he 
had so behaved himself in the fiery ordeal of parliamentary 
life that he might have returned to the " groves " of King's 
Gate without the obligation of addressing to them the humil- 
iating confession — 

" Receive me now, not nncorriipt as then, 
Nor guiltless of corrupting other men, 
But versed in arts ttiat, while they seem to stay 
A falling empire, hasten its decay." 

But by that time the home of his youth was his no longer. 

' The "Retirement" was written during the summer of 1781, and pub- 
lished in the following winter. The story of the minister who knew the 
Court and the senate so much better than he knew himself is told with 
briskness and conciseness in the hundred-and-twenty lines which come 
just half-way through the iDoem. These are probably the verses which 
Cowper, as he informs Mr. Urwin in a letter of that date, had " finished 
and polished, and touched and retouched with the utmost care," writ- 
ing them at the rate of a dozen, instead, as had been usual with him, of 
sixty, lines a morning. 0, si sic omnia! 



Ch-U-.V!!.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 2G9 

" Men of sj^irit,'' Ben Jonson tells ns, " seldom keep cartli 
long;" and the acres of King's Gate, as well as the groves 
that stood upon them, had long ere that gone the way of ev- 
erything which Fox possessed except his public honor and 
his political conscience. 

The earliest of those follies wdiicli stripped him of his pat- 
rimony before he had learned the importance of money, and 
of the solid worldly position which money gives, were com- 
mitted beneath his father's eye. For some years together, 
about this period of the family history, Lord Holland made it 
a rule to spend his winter in the South of Europe ; and his 
annual migrations, with sons, sisters-in-law, daughters-in-law, 
and tutors in his train, were, for the time that they lasted, 
more expensive than the travels of any one under an emper- 
or.* A rumor that false dice were being dug np at Hercula- 
neum had excited a faint antiquarian interest in the London 
clubs, and Charles had been commissioned to procure a pair 
for exhibition at White's. But he soon had reason to sus- 
pect that the manufacture was not obsolete in the neighbor- 
hood of Vesuvius, for, when he sailed from Xaples on his 
homeward journey, he left his father poorer, it is said, by six- 
teen thousand pounds. As far as the public has been per- 
mitted to judge, no trace of vexation can be detected in the 
older man, or of comjDunction in the 3'ounger. The slightest 
change for the better or the worse in Lord Holland's health 
affected Charles far more keenly than did his own infrequent 
gains and stujoendous losses ; and an occasional letter from a 
former political ally, containing the particulars of the son's 
last eloquent imj^ertiuence in the House of Commons never 
failed to evoke from the father expressions of unbounded, 
and apparently nncheckered, satisfaction in a lad who was 
costing him, and for three years continued to cost him, a thou- 
sand guineas a week. 



^ Lord Holland, and ]\Ir. Jesse, the editor of " George Selwyn and his 
Contemporaries," are at issue about the dates of these tours. As to the 
nature of the incidents, there is no discrepancy whatever between the 
various authorities. 



270 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

Lord Holland's renunciation of his paternal authority was 
the more disastrous because the only other influence which 
could have reclaimed or restrained the prodigal was exerted, 
so far as it was exerted at all, on the wrong side. Charles, 
who dreaded nothing so much as giving pain, and who at a 
later date, when he had been brought to see that the effort 
was demanded of him by honor, proved that he had the 
strength of will to fling off in a moment the evil habits of a 
lifetime, would never have braved his mother's displeasure or 
hardened himself against her sorrow. But Lady Holland had 
been born and bred in the society which took its tone from 
Lord Chesterfield, who had laid it down as an eleventh com- 
mandment, to be kept much more religiously than the other 
ten, that a man of fashion should hold it a matter of duty to 
be on the best of terms with the greatest possible number of 
fine French ladies. And the finest French ladies, while they 
encouraged Hume to discuss books, and bore with Priestley 
while he expounded the properties of nitrogen, and could 
even summon the appropriate emotions when Burke reasoned 
with them on the terrors of religion, had no notion of selling 
their patronage so cheap to a young fellow who had still his 
name to make. These celebrated dames, whose memory owes 
so much to the species of intellectual canonization which has 
befallen every Frenchman and Frenchwoman who wrote, 
read, or gossiped during the generation that preceded the 
Eevolution — who are now venerated as the enterprising and 
indefatigable agents of a system of free-trade in thought, al- 
ways on the alert to secure for their own country the most re- 
cent ideas that had been generated across the Channel — while 
they could discourse by the hour about Kichardson and Locke, 
seldom forgot that there was something in England better 
worth importing than sentimental novels and trial by jury. 
The political sympathy between the two capitals took a prac- 
tical and profitable form when it brought over to Paris dur- 
ing the Christmas recess two or three experienced members 
of Parliament who could be relied upon for a confidential 
opinion as to the probability of Wilkes being unseated, and 
three or four of their youthful colleagues who were ready to 



CiiAP. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 271 

bet a thousand francs on either side of the great question at 
the bidding- of a pretty or witty countess who piqued herself 
upon having made a special study of the British Constitution. 
N^or, in order to have a share of the English money, was it 
necessary to be at the pains of mastering the ins and outs of 
the Middlesex election. "There was play at my house on 
Sunday till five in the morning," wrote Madame du Deffand 
in December, 1T69. " The Fox lost a hundred and fifty 
louis. I fancy this young man will not get off for his stay 
here under two or three thousand louis." 

In order to comprehend the history of Fox's mind, as well 
as the part which he took in the most stirring events of his 
own, and perhaps of all time, it is necessary to keep in view 
the circumstance that during the most impressionable years 
of his life he was subjected to an influence which was then 
all-powerful, but which is now a tradition of the past. We 
who are nsed to see our countrymen start to scour three con- 
tinents in ^one long vacation, and come back more English 
than ever, read with a want of interest closely approaching 
incredulity the descriptions in the old novels of an eldest son 
returning from his grand tour with a valet, a monkey, and a 
trunkful of laced coats; shrugging his shoulders; swearing 
out of the libretto of an opera ; disquieting the housekeeper 
by asking for made dishes, and the butler by rising from 
table with the ladies. These fopperies are as dead to us as 
the euphuism of Elizabeth ; but a hundred and ten years ago 
an ambitious young squire, wdio did his best to disguise bis 
nationality, was going tlie right way to pass himself off upon 
his rural neighbors for a man of fashion. The genuine and 
acknowledged leaders of society were then as much Parisians 
as Londoners. They talked French fluently. They wrote it, 
if not well, at any rate well enough to corrupt their English. 
Tliey got from France their dress, their carriages, their trink- 
ets, their drink, and their morals. They knew the scandalous 
chronicle of the Faubourg St. Germain as accurately as that 
of Bloorasbury, and were better versed in the annals of the 
French peerage than of their own. During the same fort- 
night in which George Selwyn was convicted of blundering 



272 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

about tlie Howards of ISTawortli and the Howards of Corbj, 
he obtained a well-merited apology from a friend who had 
presumed to inform him that the Duke of Havre was nephew 
to the Prince of Croj. " I beg pardon," writes Lord Grant- 
ham, " for telling you who any Frenchman's uncle is, as you 
have their genealogy by heart." And well he might ; for 
Selwyn himself, and three out of four among his correspond- 
ents, as long as they were young enough to face the horrors 
of the Cliannel packet, and the dirt of the inns of Picardy, 
spent in France every odd month of their leisure and every 
spare guinea of their ready money. ^ In 1704, on the king's 
birthday, ninety-nine Englishmen of position sat down in 
Lord Hertford's hotel in Paris to one of those state banquets 
at wdiich Wilkes thanked his reputation for saving him from 
making the hundredth guest. Two days after the last race 
had been run at Ascot, the road between Calais and Abbeville 
was alive with chaises and four, streaming soutliwards as fast 
as postilions could be bribed to travel ; and two days before 
the Houses met for the winter session, a string of British leg- 
islators would be walking on board at Calais, in the brand- 
new satin coats and embroidered waistcoats which they dared 
not leave amono' their lu2:2:ao:e, cursins: the absurd commer- 
cial laws that they themselves had had a hand in framing, 
and learning more political economy in one day than they 
heard at Westminster in a twelvemonth. "The strictness of 
the custom-house still continues," wrote the Pight Honorable 
Thomas Townshend on the eleventh of November, 1764. 
" Mr. Pigby brought one fine suit of clothes, M'hicli he saved 
by wearing it when he landed. Mr. Elliot saved a coat and 
waistcoat ; but, not having taken the same precaution with 

' The certainty of four hours between Dover and Calais, with the pos- 
sibility of four-aud-tweuty ; and the inn at Amiens, where he sat, " fam- 
ished for want of clean victuals," as far away as possible from the frowsy 
tapestry behind which he could hear " the old fleas talking of Louis 
Quatorze," had convinced Walpole that he was past the age for France 
about the time that Fox was making himself at home there. " Tliese 
jaunts are too juvenile," he writes, in 1771. " I am ashamed to remember 
in what year of Methusaleh I was here first." 



Chap. VIL] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 273 

his breeches, they were seized and burned." "I could not/' 
said the Earl of Tyrone, " help blushing at the ridiculous fig- 
ure we made in our tine clothes. You must wear your gold, 
for not even a button will be admitted.'' The ground must 
have been well prepared for Adam Smith when a peer as re- 
spectable as Lord Carlisle was driven to announce that he 
should go to Paris " if it were only to settle a smuggling cor- 
respondence." 

The quantity of time that our ancestors consumed in France 
may be estimated by the amount of vicarious shopping which 
they accomplished. There is a letter in which the Honorable 
Henry St. John, better known as " the Baptist " among the 
grown-up schoolboys of St. James's Street, calmly directs 
George Selwyn to buy him thirty pounds' worth of books, 
the set of engravings from Yernet's views of the French sea- 
ports, an enamelled watch, and a half-dozen tea-cups. And 
when St. John, in his turn, went to Paris, he reports himself as 
having purchased a snuff-box, a pair of buckles, a dressing- 
gown, and some tables for Selwyn ; chosen a silk, worked with 
olives, for the Earl of March ; and executed a very intricate 
order for a parcel of gauze on behalf of an Italian marchion- 
ess in whom that worthy couple, partners elsewhere than at 
Xewmarket, maintained a common interest. St. John's bur- 
den was no heavier than that of others ; for he mentions a 
nobleman who had come from England loaded with commis- 
sions, though he did not know a good shop from a bad one. 
Walpole, whose thirty years' experience of the Paris streets 
qualified him to make money go as far as anybody, was pro- 
vided by the ladies of his acqiiaintance with occupation for 
every day that he passed in that city. In a letter written in 
1771 he gives Lord Ossory the choice of tliree clocks ; tells 
Lady Ossory, prettily enough, that he has bought her canvas 
and silk " to the value of fort3'-six livres two sous, which, when 
the materials shall be manufactured by your ladyship, will in- 
crease a millionfold ;" and laments that the trade in knick- 
knacks had fallen oS. to such an extent that he knew all the 
snuff-boxes and toothpick -cases in the windows as well as 
every succeeding administration knew the face of that typical 

18 



274 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

placeman, Mr. Welbore Ellis. Wilkes, distrustful of English 
taste, would commit to no judgment less august than that of 
Baron d'Holbach the charge of selecting the shade of scarlet 
cloth which set off his remarkable person to the best advan- 
tage. But the most serious responsibility that could befall a 
tourist was to be requested by a friend at home to bring him 
over a carriage. The London coach-builders had then a great 
deal to learn ; while the French were among the best in Eu- 
rope, and were still improving, " In their dress and equi- 
pages," said AValpole, " they are grown very simple. AVe 
English are living upon their old gods and goddesses. I roll 
about in a chariot decorated wnth Cupids, and look like the 
grandfather of Adonis." 

Men of a very different stamp from Lord March were fre- 
quent visitors to Paris on worthier errands than that of re- 
plenishing their wardrobes and buying presents for other peo- 
ple's wives. There a stranger whose name possessed any lus- 
tre, or whose conversation had any charm, was assured of 
meeting with a reception which gave him a comfortable sense 
of being famous and agreeable. To draw out the indolent, 
to set the diffident at ease, to tolerate vanity in others while 
tacitly and unobtrusively exacting deference for themselves, 
were then, as always, the arts of true-born Frenchwomen ; 
and those arts were never so skilfully and willingly practised 
as when they were emploj^ed for the delectation of an Eng- 
lishman. The British name was venerated on the Continent, 
Those were the days when it was a distinction to have breathed 
the same native air as the man " who had frightened the Great 
Mogul, and had liked to have tossed the Kings of France and 
Spain in a blanket if somebody had not cut a hole in it and 
let them slip through," and who had so fascinated the lively 
imagination of his chivalrous adversaries that a shy member 
of Parliament whose French had been acquired at Eton, or 
even at Edinburgh, might esteem himself lucky if he could 
escape from a Parisian supper- party without having been 
pressed to oblige the company with a specimen of Mr. Pitt's 
speaking. Gibbon has gratefully recorded the attentions 
which were lavished upon an author who had paid his hosts 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 275 

tlic compliment of writing liis first boolv in the language of a 
jieople whom his own countrymen had so soundly beaten. 
Tlie master and mistress of a French household (so he tells 
us) appeared to think that in entertaining him they were con- 
ferring a favor upon themselves. " Our opinions, our fash- 
ions, even our games, were adopted in France, and every Eng- 
lishman was supposed to be born a patriot and a philosopher." 
And when the Parisians got hold of a real philosopher, who 
had a more solid claim to the title than having been bred on 
the same side of the water as Ilobbes, there certainly was no 
stint in the adulation with which they regaled him. " I eat," 
said David Hume, "nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but 
nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread upon nothing 
but flowers. Every man, and still more every lady, would 
think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty if 
they did not make a long and elaborate harangue in my 
praise." The very babes and sucklings joined in the chorus. 
At Versailles the great writer was presented to three future 
kings of France, of whom only one had as yet arrived at the 
dignity of a jacket and frills. The Due de Berri gravely pro- 
claimed himself an admirer of Hume, and begged to be en- 
rolled among the number of his friends. The Comte de Pro- 
vence assured him that his arrival had long been impatiently 
expected by Frenchmen, even by those for whom, like him- 
self, the perusal of his fine " History " was still a pleasure to 
come ; and the Comte d'Artois, who was six years old and 
looked four, mumbled some fragments of a panegyric which 
had been half forgotten on the way from the nursery. 

English people of fashion, who were accustomed to see au- 
thors kept in their proper place, could not understand why 
such a fuss should be made about a man with nothing but his 
talents to recommend him ; but the contrast between the es- 
timation in which literature was held at home and abroad 
only enhanced the pleasure of so kindly a welcome to the ob- 
jects of it. An author who in London had been made to feel 
at every turn that he was consorting with those who were 
wealthier and more important than himself, and was deafened 
by a ceaseless clatter of selfish personal politics which appealed 



276 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

to tlie higher intelligence almost as little as the jargon of the 
Stock Exchange, at Paris was as good as the very best, and en- 
joyed the novel luxury of being invited to dwell upon his 
favorite topics, and give utterance to his most cherished 
thoughts/ Among the factious barbarians of the British 
metropolis (such was the constant burden of Hume's indig- 
nant rhetoric), men of letters had no weight with their fel- 
lows and no confidence in themselves, but were sunk and lost 
" in the general torrent of the world,"' But -Paris was a home 
of culture, a nursing mother of intellect, a centre of the only 
good society that merited the name. At Paris an article on 
the Patriarchs by Voltaire made as much noise as an attack 
upon the ministry by Charles Townshend ever made in Lon- 
don ; and the mere rumor that Rousseau was likely to walk in 
the Luxembourg Gardens would draw larger crowds than in 
England assembled at a horse-race. " People may talk of an- 
cient Greece as they please, but no nation was ever so fond of 
genius as this ;" and, in his capacity of a man of genius, Hume 
fondly and frequently recurred to the idea of settling at Paris 
for the remainder of his days ; while Gibbon confessed that 
nothing but the necessity of earning his bread and obeying 
his father could have induced him to tear himself from a res- 
idence among a people " who have established a freedom and 
ease in society unknown to antiquity and still unpractised by 
other nations." ^ 

1 Arthur Young, who, as a man of science with a specialty, was made 
much of by tlie French nobility, gives the same explanation as Hume of 
the contrast between tlie two countries. " I should pity," he writes, " the 
man who expected to be well received in a brilliant circle in London Ije- 
cause he happened to be a member of the Royal Society. But a member 
of the Academy of Sciences at Paris is sure of a good reception every- 
where. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due re- 
gard to anything else." 

^ Those who liave read enough literary autobiography to be aware how 
easy it is for autliors to overrate their own social successes might susi)ect 
that Hume was less ardently worshipped than he imagined; but all that 
be says about himself is confirmed by the envious sneers of his contem- 
poraries, who were never tired of describing liim in prose and verse as 

" Drunk with Gallic wine and Gallic praise," 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 2(7 

While Louis tlie Sixteenth was a boy in the schooh-oom, 
and De Lauzun a dashing bridegroom who woiikl have hiughed 
at the notion that he or his duchess would ever know either 
sorrow or terror, this international commerce in conrt-scandal 
and clocked stockings had nothing about it wliich seemed like- 
ly to engage the attention of posterity. But a time came 
when the close alliance between the higher orders in the two 
countries was to produce results of world-wide magnitude. 
The sympathy excited among the families which governed 
England by the misfortunes of the families which were con- 
spicuous in France before the Revolution mowed them down 
like a whirlwind in a grove of beeches was the most passion- 
ate emotion that the sufferings of men alien in race and blood 
have ever inspired in any section of our community. That 
sympathy Avas stronger, and more practical in its effects, than 
the compassion which our nation felt for tlie Protestants of 
Holland in the days of the Spanish fury, or for the Huguenots 
in the days of the dragonnades ; for the patriots of the Tyrol, 
of Hungary, of Naples ; for the slaves of South Carolina ; for 
the victims of Turkish cruelty in Greece, and of Russian 
cruelty in Poland. The silken bonds of common pleasures 
and tastes, which seem trifling enough at the moment, proved 



although, in point of fact, the second charge was as unfounded as the 
first. Horace Walpole, who, both as an eclipsed man of letters and a 
somewhat antiquated person of fashion, could not keep his patience 
while Hume was talking Deism in a broad Scotch accent to a circle of 
duchesses with whose mothers he had himself exchanged louts rimes in 
days when Fleury was minister, tried in vain to disguise his vexation 
under the cloak of a new-found and speedily dropped zeal on behalf of 
outraged piety. His letters from France are full of strictures on the au- 
dacity of the fair Parisians, who discussed Genesis while the footmen 
were in the room ; on the dreariness of their conversation, which " want- 
ed nothing but George Grenville to be the most tiresome upon earth ; " 
and on their bad taste in making a prophet of Rousseau, and a lion of 
Hume, "who is the only thing that they believe in implicitly; wliich 
they must do, for I defy them to understand any language tliat he 
speaks." At length Hume went over to England, and, for his sorrow, 
carried Rousseau with him ; and then Walpole began once more to en- 
joy himself as of old. 



278 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

strono-er under the test than the ties of religious faith or of 
political creed ; and while tlie democrats of Paris were ap- 
pealing almost in vain to the brotherhood which, according 
to the Jacobin programme, was to unite against their tjrants 
all the peoples of Europe, there was nothing fictitious or shal- 
low in the sentiment of class fraternity which instantly and 
spontaneously enlisted the gentry of Great Britain in deter- 
mined and implacable hostility to the French Eepublic. When 
De Montmorencies and De Liancourts came flying over on 
much more pressing business than that of engaging jockeys 
or inspecting fancy cattle, their English comrades of earlier 
and merrier days proved themselves no fair-weather friends. 
Just as, after the fall of the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon 
could count among his former subjects no partisans more sin- 
cere and loyal in their sorrow than those fashionable citizens 
of New York who had resorted to his court in search of the 
delights which they looked for in vain at home, so, ninety 
years before, the old society of France found its chief mourn- 
ers in the club-rooms and drawing-rooms of London. When 
the city which had been the paradise of wits and dandies was 
delivered over to a mob of porters and fishwives officered by 
provincial attorneys — when to dress badly, and feed coarse- 
ly, and talk an inflated jargon borrowed from third-rate trans- 
lations of the classics had come to be the distinguishing 
mark of a Parisian — George Selwyn and the Duke of Queens- 
berry regarded the unattractive spectacle much as a good Mus- 
sulman would regard the desecration jof Mecca. And better 
men than Queensberry and Selwyn were aghast at the deeds 
of violence and barbarity that were perpetrated daily on the 
very altar of the shrine of elegance and refinement. France, 
after the emigration, was for Walpole a den of wild beasts, a 
desert full of hyenas. Frenchmen were wretches who " had 
destroyed the power of words" to paint their depravity; can- 
nibals, scalp-hunters, wolves, tigers, a mad herd of swine that 
had not the decency to make an end of themselves in the sea; 
monsters, of whom until the earth was purged, peace and mo- 
rality would never revisit it. Even Gibbon's blood was warmed 
by the prospect of exterminating the "miscreants" whose Ian- 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 279 

gnagc lie liad written more easily than English, and whose 
country he once would gladly have adopted as his home. Our 
compatriots, with one bright exception, in proportion as they 
had formerly liked France, thenceforward hated the French 
people ; but the clear intellect and generons heart of Fox pre- 
served him from exhibiting in such an irrational and unwor- 
thy form his gratitude for the pleasant months which he had 
passed on French soil. His personal connections lay exclu- 
sively with the class which was paying so cruelly, and in many 
cases so undeservedly, for centuries of undisputed privilege 
and secure enjoyment; but he had sympathy to spare for the 
twenty millions of peasants and artisans who had long toiled 
and fasted, and who, intoxicated for the moment by unaccus- 
tomed and untempered draughts of liberty, were still, for bet- 
ter or for worse, the French nation. Though every hearth in 
Paris that had entertained him was cold, and though all his 
hosts were in exile or in the grave, France was there with her 
mighty past and her splendid future — with her rare genius, 
however obscured, and her high instincts, however perverted 
— and he could not bring himself to acquiesce in her exclusion 
from the pale of humanity. Burke never uttered a truer met- 
aphor than when he likened Fox's love for France to the at- 
tachment of a cat which continues faithful to the house after 
the family has left it. 

Fox might well retain through life a sense of having been 
domesticated in a country where he had made himself so thor- 
oughly at home. He was a magnificent s]3ecimen of those 
young travelling Englishmen who in another generation used 
to excite the amused admiration of Goethe by their open and 
unembarrassed bearing in a society that was foreign to them ; 
by the confidence with which they cross-examined the father 
of German literature in as much of his own language as they 
had picked up between Cologne and Weimar; by their in- 
stinctive and unaffected conviction that " they were lords 
everywhere, and that the whole world belonged to them.'" 

^"Whetliei' it is," said Goethe, "the race, the soil, the free political 
constitution, or the liealthy tone of education, the English show to great 



2S0 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

Those English manners in which Goethe was philosopher 
enouo-h to recognize the qualities that had made England free at 
home and dominant abroad, and which he was man enough to 
relish and love, were not to the taste of the celebrated French- 
woman who, having given law to one generation by her smiles 
and to another by her wit, was beginning to feel doubtful of her 
hold on the social allegiance of a new race of people whose ways 
of thought were not hers, and whose faces she had never seen. 
Madame da Deffand's notions of what a great English states- 
man's son should be were derived from Horace Walpole, wlio, 
turned of fifty and chastened by gout, was never so liappy as 
when seated at her tea-table, gathering anecdotes of the Ke- 
gency, submitting to be rallied on his pronunciation of the 
French diphthongs, and encouraging her to believe that, to a 
right-minded devotee of the sex, high spirits at seventy-three 
were as attractive as the sprightliness of one-and-twenty. Eut 
she M-as not fond of Charles Fox, nor easy in his company. 
He did not fail in the outward respect which, according to 
the social code then in force, was due to a lady who had sin- 
ned in such very high quarters, and so very many years be- 
fore. He diligently attended her parties, and guessed her 
riddles, and consulted her, as the first living authority, on the 
vexed point whether the expression nne jolie figure related 
only to the features, or " to every part of the body which is 
susceptible of beauty." But Madame du Deffand was not too 
blind to perceive that he would rather have been studying 
that question with his cousin the Dnke of Berwick, after the 
ancestral fashion of their family, at the feet of three fair 
professors whose united ages fell short of hers;' however 



advantage. The secret does not lie in rank and riches. It lies in the 
courage ^vhich they have to be that for which nature has made them. 
There is nothing vitiated, half-way, or crooked about them ; but, such as 
they are, they are complete men. That they are also sometimes complete 
fools, I allow with all my heart; but that is still something, and has some 
weight in the scale of nature." 

^ " I supped last night," writes Fox, in November, 1770, '• with Lauzun. 
Fitz.Tames, and some others, at what they call a Chi a VAnglaise. It 
was in a petite maison of Lauzun's. There was Madame Briseau and two 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 281 

conrag'coiisly she might toil to prove herself as yoimg as her 
neighbors by running to all the j)nppet-shows and theatres, 
and making parties to drive in the Boulevard by moonlight, 
on the ground that it was too early to go to bed at one in the 
morning. The character of the young man was to her a moral 
and intellectual problem which afforded endless matter for 
discourse. He never spent an evening in her drawing-room 
without leaving her piqued, puzzled, and occasionally not a 
little frightened. Her letters to Walpole suggest the idea of 
a cat and a lap-dog talking over a lion's cub which had some- 
how found its way on to the hearth-rug. " I told 3'ou," she 
writes, " not long ago, that I was giving my last supper of 
twelve, and that I never again would have so many. Well, 
as a natural consequence, we yesterday were sixteen, which 
spoiled my evening. They set up a vingt-et-un ; but I did 
not play. Your young people stayed to the very end ; Fox, 
Spenser, and Fitzpatrick. I tliink the last is my favorite, for 
his soft, tractable manners ; but I know him too little to judge. 
As for the Fox, he is hard, bold, and ready, with all the con- 
fidence of his merit. He will not spare the time to look well 
about liim, but sees everything at a glance, and takes a bird's- 
eye view of tlie situation. I am inclined to think that one 
person is much the same to him as another. It is not from 
self-sufficiency, for he strikes me as neither vain nor supercil- 
ious ; but he does not put his mind to yours, and I am satis- 
fied that he will never form any connections except such as 
arise from play, and perhaps from politics ; but of politics I 
know nothing." Fox, she saj'S elsewhere, brought Fitzpatrick 
to see her; but the visit was a failure. She was tired; she 
did not know how to talk to young people ; and, if she had 
been willing to confess it, such young jieople as Fox, or even 
as Fitzpatrick, had not often come within the sphere of her 
observation. 

other women. The supper was execrably bad. However, the champagne 
and tokay were excellent; notwithstanding which the fools made du 
fonclie with bad rum. This club is to meet every Saturday, either here 
or at Versailles. I am glad to see that we cannot be foolisher in point 
of imitation than thev are." 



282 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

As time went on, and the fame of the young statesman per- 
vaded the Continent, Madame dn Deffand made more and 
more desperate efforts to comprehend and to class him ; but 
she arrived at no other result than that of producing a series 
of sketchy but suggestive studies of Charles Fox as he appear- 
ed at successive stages of his early manhood to an observer 
with whom he had as little in common as one very clever per- 
son could well have M'itli another. At last, after watching 
him for seven years, she gave it up as hopeless, and allowed 
that he was too English for her to understand — an acknowl- 
edgment which it certainly was high time to make when she 
had committed herself to the psychological position that, while 
overflowing with wit, kindness, and sincerity, he was at the 
same time nothing short of detestable. She never could for- 
give him his carelessness as to whether the companions of his 
leisure hours thought him earnest or frivolous, brilliant or 
commonplace. A great genius is apt to fare ill at the hands 
of the memoir-writers, who deal with the surface of society, 
and who (unless, like Sully and De Segur, they have them- 
selves been men of action) are seldom quick in recognizing 
the forces that move the world. Kapoleon was detected as a 
second-rate man by the diplomatist who overheard him in- 
form twenty ladies in succession that it was a warm day; 
and of about equal value was Madame du Deffand's verdict 
that Fox had a good heart, but no principles — delivered at a 
time when he was already the life and soul of the stoutest and 
most disinterested struggle for principle that ever had been 
fought out by voice and pen' — and her announcement that he 
was perpetually drunk with high spirits, and that his head was 
turned without hope of recovery, during a period when he 
was daily convincing so acute and impartial a judge as Gibbon 

' " Above all, my dear lord, I hope that it Avill be a point of honor 
among us all to support the American pretensions in adversity as much 
as we did in their prosperity, and that we shall never desert those who 
have acted unsuccesrfuUy upon Whig principles, while we continue to 
profess our admiration of those who succeeded in the same principles in 
the year 1688." So wrote Fox to Rockingham when the hopes of the 
colonists had been, to all appearance, finally shattered on Long Island. 



Chap. VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 283 

that "ill the conduct of a party he approved himself equal 
to the conduct of an empire." 

It is not only in Madame du Deffand's letters that the 
names of Fox and Fitzpatrick occur in close and constant 
juxtaposition. With the exception of a short interval, when 
the less distinguished of the two was fighting in America, 
and fighting well, for a cause which they both equally disap- 
proved, one of the young men is rarely mentioned anywhere 
without the next sentence bringing an allusion to tlie other. 
Fitzpatrick's father was the Lord Ossory whose daughter was 
married to Lord Holland's eldest son, a relationship quite near 
enough to turn into sworn brothers a pair who seemed made 
for each other both by nature and circumstances. Equals in 
rank, and virtuall}^ equals in age — for the two additional 
years during which Fitzpatrick had been enjoying himself 
on the earth did no more than counterbalance the amazing 
precocity of his companion — the boys at once struck np an 
alliance, offensive and defensive, which only death dissolved. 
Wherever Fox was in difiiculty or danger, whether in the 
heat of debate at midnight, or at daybreak on the chill grass 
of Hyde Park, Fitzpatrick was at his side to see him through 
the business; and, when amusement was on foot, the friends 
were inseparable. They had everything in common — pur- 
suits, accomplishments, house-room, horse-flesh, their money, as 
long as it lasted, and afterwards what they were pleased to 
call their credit. They were both delightful talkers, whose 
society people twice their age gladly purchased by the sacri- 
fice of a morning's work, or the indefinite prolongation of an 
after-dinner sitting. Fitzpatrick rapidly obtained, and long 
kept, the reputation of being the most agreeable member of a 
society so agreeable that posterity is tempted to forget how 
little else it had to recommend it. Fox, on the other hand, 
as his energies became absorbed, and his appetite for display 
surfeited by his labors and triumphs as an orator, soon lost 
the habit of exerting himself in conversation, lie became 
content to alternate between silent attention in the presence 
of those whom he thought better worth hearing than himself, 
and a lazy outpouring of whatever engaged his mind at the 



284 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIL 

moment, which his hearers drank in without consciously admir- 
ing, and most unfortunately (for the scanty samples that re- 
main are redolent of fancy, sense, and humor) without under- 
taking to record. Both the friends wrote verses, in the old 
stilted manner, with a superabundance of capital letters, and 
without even an elementary trace of a conception that what was 
sung ought to bear some relation to what was felt. Their most 
ambitious flight was on the occasion when, in Ma}^ 1775, they 
tuned their pipes to celebrate the charms of Mrs. Crewe, while 
no less competent an umpire than Mason consented to play 
Paleemon to the rival swains. The palm was adjudged to 
Fox. "The young cub's" (so Mason w^-ote) "is certainly the 
best. It has something of character and originality about it. 
The other is the most old-fashioned thing to be written by a 
young man of fashion that I ever read. He might have writ 
it in a full-bottomed wig. If my friend had not dated it, 
I should have thought it printed somewhere about the last 
four years of Queen Anne." It is difficult to imagine what 
could be less original, and more archaic, than the closing lines 
of the successful poem : 

"If then for this once iu my Life I am free, 
And escape from a Snare might catcli wiser tlian me, 
'Tis that Beauty alone but imperfectly charms, 
For though Brightness may dazzle, 'tis kindness that warms. 
As on Suns in the Winter with Pleasure we gaze, 
But feel not their Force, though their Splendor we praise. 
So Beauty our just Admiration may claim; 
But Love, and Love only, our Hearts can inflame." ' 

' It is pretty to contrast with the labored frigidity of this youtliful per- 
formance the verses which Fox addressed to his wife in 1797, composed 
as he was being brought home badly wounded from the shooting-field: 

" Sense of pain and danger flies 
From the looks of those dear eyes ; 
Looks of kindness, looks of love, 
That lift my mortal thoughts above. 
While I view that heavenly face, 
While I feel that dear embrace. 
While I hear that sootiiing voice, 
Though maimed or crippled, life's my choice. 



Chap. VII.] CHAKLES JAMES FOX. 285 

But Fitzpatrick as well as Fox had better stuff in liim than 
to waste his ingenuitj in trying to write like Parnell wlien 
Parnell was trying to write like Waller. Ten years later, in 
tlie maturity of his powers, a happy chance revealed to him 
the quarter where his real strength lay ; and as the author of 
half what is good, and almost all of what is best, in the 
"KoUiad,'' he has permanently connected his reputation with 
a literary performance which Whigs may be excused for re- 
garding as the best political satire since Drj'den, 

The identity in tastes between the young kinsmen did not 
stop with poetiy. There was hardly one of the Muses, and, 
sooth to say, not many earthly goddesses, whom, at one time 
or another, they had not worshipped together. They were 
both devoted to the stage ; and their earlier correspondence, 
so far as it has any heart in it, refers to little else. There is 
something comical and rather taking in the eagerness with 
which Fox canvassed the histrionic capabilities of all his 
friends and relations. Every chance acquaintance whom he 
picked np on the Continent was forthwith enlisted in his 
troop, and thrust straight into the leading business, even 
though the unlucky recruit might never have learned ten 
lines of Yirgil correctly all the while he was at Eton. "Your 
sister," he writes to Fitzpatrick from Florence, " is a very 
good actress. Lady Sarah's fame is well known. She acted 
extremely well in the comedy. In the tragedy he did not 
know his part. Carlisle is not an excellent actor, but will 

Without these, all the fates can give 
Has nought to make me wish to live. 
No, could they foil the power of time, 
And restore youth's boasted prime ; 
Add, to boot, fame, power, and wealth, 
Undisturbed and certain health. 
Without thee 'twould nouglit avail ; 
The source of every joy would fail : • 
But loved by thee, by thee caressed. 
In pain and sickness I am blest." 

Such lines at fifty are worth more to the subject of them tliau a ream of 
sonnets at six-and-twenty. 



286 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VH. 

make a very useful one. Peter Brodie is the best manager 
prompter in the world. We want another actor or two, but 
much more another actress. There are few comedies that do 
not require above two women." When, under the combined 
excitement afforded by the prospect of an heir and of a seat 
in Parliament, poor Stephen Fox allowed his dramatic ardor 
to flag, the stern indignation of his j^ounger brother was pos- 
itively impressive. "He does not," exclaimed Charles, "so 
much as mention acting in any of his letters; but I liope his 
enthusiasm (for such it was last year) will return. Indeed, it 
will be very absurd if he has built a theatre for nothing. You 
may tell my brother I can get two actors for him ; one good- 
ish and one baddish. I have not engaged them, but I know I 
can have them." " The two actors I mentioned" (so he tells 
Fitzpatrick in his next) " were Price and Fitzwilliam. The 
former has appeared with great success in the part of Glouces- 
ter in ' Jane Shore,' though in Alonzo in ' The Revenge ' he 
lost much of the credit he had gained. You will oblige me 
very much if you will put him up at Al mack's till he is cho- 
sen, without minding how many blackballs he has. Pray do 
not blackball him yourself. As to Fitzwilliam, he says he 
should like to act, but I do not believe he will, and I think he 
would make a bad actor." 

Fox was reckoned Fitzpatrick's suj^erior in tragedy, but 
much his inferior in genteel comedy. They made a point of 
frequently exchanging their parts, and took infinite pains to 
improve, and, as they at first thought, to perfect, themselves 
where they were respectively deficient. But their misplaced 
ambition did not outlast the time when the j^ounger of them 
was four-and-twenty, and had been a man about town for the 
eight years which were the golden era of our green-room, with 
the opportunity of sitting four times a week in a theatre man- 
aged as no British theatre. has been managed before or since. 
He was already making his way into that choice social circle 
of which Garrick was an ornament, and might gather from 
the comments or (more convincingly still) from the expressive 
silence of the master what was the worth of amateur acting 
according to the greatest actor who ever spoke the language 



Ohap.VII.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 287 

of the greatest of dramatists/ From 1773 onwards, Fox con- 
cerned himself no more with a pastime whicli was at best but 
an imitation of an imitation, and gave his nndistracted powers 
to an art in which his success had been as signal and as in- 
stantaneous as the success of Garrick on the stage. For the 
pursuit of that art his long apprenticesliip to the buskin was 
among the most important of his qualifications. It was no 
slight advantage to a great extempore speaker to have at hand 
an extensive and diversified stock of quotations from that 
branch of literature which is nearest akin to oratory ; and for 
such a speaker it is essential that the voice, no less than the 
memory and the reasoning faculty, should be under absolute 
control. That laborious discipline in the theory and practice 
of elocution through which Fox was carried by his disinter- 
ested passion for the drama, but which no one who ever lived 
was less likely to have deliberately undertaken with an eye to 
parliamentary advancement, had gained him a command of 
accent and gesture which, as is always the case with the high- 
est art, gave his marvellous rhetoric the strength and the sim- 
plicity of nature. The pains which he had bestowed upon 

* Garrick, as oral tradition relates, was invited to witness some private 
theatricals at a great country-house. After the performance he was anx- 
iously questioned as to the merits of the actors, and, seeing that he must 
say something, he gave it as liis opinion that the gentleman who played 
the king seemed quite at home on the stage. It turned out that his 
praise had been bestowed upon a scene-shifter from his own theatre, wlio 
had been brought down from Loudon to superintend the mechanical ar- 
rangements, and had taken the part on an emergency. 

Fox was elected at Brooks's about the same time that Garrick returned 
from the protracted Continental tour on which he had resolved when, 
after having kept the town at his feet for twenty years, he noticed that 
the public for a while had grown weary of praising him. His Italian 
journey, undertaken from tlie same motives as Napoleon's expedition to 
Egypt, produced the same decisive effect upon his career and his reputa- 
tion. London, as tired of hearing Powell rant as France of seeing Barras 
misgovern, welcomed back her favorite with a succession of nightly ova- 
tions, and took care that he should never again suspect her fidelity. The 
critics remarked that Garrick, artist enough to be a learner at eight-and- 
forty, had cured himself, by a course of study in the Parisian theatres, 
of that occasional excess of emphasis which was his only fault. 



288 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VII. 

learuino- to speak the words of others enabled him to concen- 
trate his undivided attention upon the arduous task of impro- 
vising his own. If only lie could find the thing which re- 
quired to be said, he was sure to say it in the way that would 
produce the greatest possible effect. His variety of manner, 
we are told, was quite as remarkable as the richness of his 
matter. The modulations of his voice responded exactly to 
the nature of his subject and the emotions of his mind. When 
he was piling up his arguments, so correct in their sequence, 
and, as we read them now with cool and impartial judg- 
ments, for the most part so irresistible in their weight, every 
one of his massive sentences "came rolling like a wave of the 
Atlantic, three thousand miles long." If his cadences at times 
waxed shrill and even inharmonious, and his enunciation be- 
came almost preternaturally rapid, it was only when his hear- 
ers were so fascinated by his burning logic, and so entranced 
by the contagion of his vehemence, that he could hardly speak 
fast enough or loud enough to satisfy them. Ilis deep tones, 
which occurred rarely, and then but for a moment, were re- 
served for occasions that necessitated a solenm appeal to the 
compassion or the justice of the assembly wdiich he was ad- 
dressing, and never failed to go straight to the heart of every 
one present. Feeling profoundly, thinking accurately and 
stronglj^, trained thoroughl}^ in all the external graces of ora- 
tory, " Fox during the American war, Fox in liis best days," 
was declared by Grattan to have been the best speaker that 
he ever heard ; and Grattan, over and above his experiences 
in the Irish Parliament, had formed his taste on Chatham, and 
had lived through the great days of Burke, Pitt, and Sheridan, 
to hear Brougham on the " Orders in Council," and Canning 
on the "Emancipation of the Catholics." 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 289 



CHAPTER YIII. 

1770-1771. 

The Law of Libel. — Great Speech by Charles Fox, and Burke's Replj'. — 
Final Solution of the Question. — Contest of Parliament with the Re- 
porters. — Scene in the Lords. — Indignation of the Commons. — Artful 
Conduct of Charles Fox. — Lord George Germaine's Duel. — The 0ns- 
lows. — Their Warfare with the Press. — The King begins to take an In- 
terest in the Controversy. — A Night of Divisions. — John Wheble. — In- 
terference of Wilkes. — Miller Arrested, and Discharged by the Guild- 
hall Bench. — Proceedings in the House of Commons against the Lord 
Mayor and Alderman Oliver. — Rebellion of the King's Friends against 
Lord Nortli. — Fiery Speech of Charles Fox. — Feeling against him in 
the Country. — March of the City upon Westminster. — Violent Conduct 
of the Majority in the House. — Wcdderburu's Defection from the Op- 
position.— Popular Excitement outside Parliament. — Fox and North 
Maltreated. — The Lord Mayor and the Alderman Committed to the 
Tower. — Their Imprisonment and Release. — Testimonial to Wilkes. — 
Establishment of the Freedom of Reporting Debates in Parliament. 

Such, in the heyday of youth, was Charles Fox, and such 
was his chosen friend. Their joint stock of sagacity and folly, 
of power and frailty, of sterling merits and grievous faults, 
was amply sufficient to have made a score of reputations and 
wrecked a hundred careers. When Lord Holland was at 
King's Gate or on the Continent, the pair took up their quar- 
ters together over Mackie's Italian warehouse in Piccadilly. 
Some frequenters of Brooks's were soft-hearted enough to pity 
the landlord of two such seductive and unprofitable lodgers, 
and predicted that his ruin would date from the day on which 
he let them his rooms. " On the contrary," said Selwyn, " so 
far from ruining him, they will make Mackie's fortune ; for 
he wull have the finest j)ickles in his house of any man in 
London ;" and the phrase, unceremonious as it was, conveys a 
truer notion of Fox when just out of his teens than a solemn 

19 



290 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

and elaborate analysis of his cliaracter and liis policy. He was 
not all that he should have been between 1770 and 1774; but 
those who read his life are the last who have a right to com- 
plain of him. Politics are so grave a trade that a politician of 
nature years can hardly be an amusing personage unless he 
sinks into the absurd and the unbecoming ; and there is there- 
fore all the more reason to be thankful for those few great 
men wdio have played a foremost part at an age when high 
spirits and audacious actions are among the most hojjeful 
symptoms of future excellence. During the earliest, and mnch 
the longest, portion of his first Parliament, Fox, as the spoiled 
child of the worst House of Commons that ever met, seemed 
bent upon ascertaining how much unsound argument and pert 
dogmatism would be tolerated from a ready and an agreeable 
speaker, and how often it was permissible to go in and out of 
place without any adequate reason for leaving office, or justi- 
fication for resuming it. He did not mend his ways until even 
tlie fagot voters of Midlmrst Avere tired of electing and re- 
electing him, and until lie had exhausted his sauciness and his 
sophistry in declaiming against all the principles with which 
his name was thereafter to be identified, and most of the 
measures which he himself or the statesmen bred in liis 
school were some day to place upon the Statute-book, 

The activity and pertinacity which the ministry displayed 
in punishing, or attempting to punish, the printers and vend- 
ers of the " Letter to the King" had gravely alarmed every one 
who desired that the freedom of the British press should be 
anything but an empty name. It was idle to hope that a na- 
tion would ever enjoy a political literature that Avas at the 
same time outspoken and respectable, while its booksellers, 
as AVilkes most truly said, "lived always in a state of jeop- 
ardy, like soldiers fighting for their country." Sustained and 
effective criticism was impossible when a writer who smartly 
assailed the measures of the government was sure, sooner or 
later, to be prosecuted at the expense of the State, on a charge 
of having traduced the personal character of the king or the 
minister. The Opposition lost no time in calling attention 
to so pressing a danger. On the day fortnight after Parlia- 



1770-71.J CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 291 

ment met for tlio ^v^Ilter session of IVTO, a debate was raised 
by Captain Constantino Phipps, the member for Lincoln, an 
industrious and sententious youth who, as Lord Mulgrave, 
was erelong to embark on a course of tergiversation which 
earned him an English peerage, a long succession of ricWy 
paid offices, and a couplet by Fitzpatrick worth all tlie pain- 
fully composed and minutely revised speeches that he ever 
made on either side of any controversy.' Captain Phipps, 
always eager to prove how large a stock of law might be 
laid in by a sailor, attacked the question on its most techni- 
cal quarter, and moved for leave to introduce a bill limit- 
ing the right of the attorney-general to file informations for 
libel. But, by the time half a dozen members had spoken, 
it became evident tliat the House was upon a wrong scent, 
and that the officers of the Crown might be safely intrusted 
with the power of filing what informations they chose, so 
long as it was clearly established that a jurj^ was to decide the 
issue. But Lord Mansfield's doctrine, that it was for the 
judge to determine whether a paper was libellous, w^iile the 
jury were only concerned with the fact of publication, had 
placed at the mercy of himself and his brethren every printer 
and author in the kingdom. It was true that, in the recent 
trials, London juries had refused to let out of their own keep- 
ing the fortunes and liberty of their fellow -citizens. But 
that bold course had been adopted under the influence of an 
excited public feeling which to a large extent w'as temporary 
and local ; and the tradesmen of a provincial assize town, in 
quiet times, could not be expected, in direct contradiction to 
what would be told them from the bench, to insist on usurp- 
ing a function which the greatest judge of modern days had 
repeatedly and emphatically pronounced not to belong to 
them. Accordingly, after the lapse of another fortnight, 

' " Acute observers, who with skilful keu 
Descry the characters of public men, 
Exchange with pleasure Elliot, Lew'sham, North, 
Tor Mulgrave's tried integrity and worth. 
And all must own that worth completely tried 
By turns experienced on every side." 



292 THE EARLY HISTOEY OF [Cii.vi-. VIII. 

Sergeant Glj'nn, tutored by Shelburne, who in his turn had 
been inspired by Chatham, went straight to the root of the 
matter bj^ moving for a committee Avhich sliould inquire into 
the administration of justice in cases rehiting to the press, 
and clear up the doubts that had been cast upon the author- 
ity of juries. 

The discussion, in quality and in duration, responded to 
the importance of the subject. De Grey, the attorney -gen- 
eral, speaking with temper and ingenuity, opposed the motion 
on behalf of the government ; and he was supported by 
Thurlow, who, while he showed his sense of the gravity of 
the question by an unusual decency of language, made 
amends to himself by indulging in even more than a usual 
audacity of assertion. After adjuring his brother -members 
to protect virtue from the assaults of calumny — an appeal 
which, if rather trite, had at any rate the merit of being un- 
selfish — he proceeded to enforce the proposition that in State 
libels it was idle to hope for fairness from jurymen, "who 
might justly be considered as parties concerned against the 
Crown." To have proclaimed the humiliating confession 
that the subjects of the Crown, as then worn, must be counted 
among its enemies, would at happier periods of our history 
have been the death-blow to a rising lawyer. But Thurlow 
was as well acquainted as any man living with the source 
which in those days fed the fountain of honor; and a decla- 
ration which, if made under a sovereign proud of being a 
constitutional monarch, would have sent him to pine on the 
back benches until his sin was purged and forgotten, exalted 
him into being George the Third's attorney -general within 
seven weeks after it had been uttered. The ministerial law- 
yers met with competent antagonists in the members of their 
own profession. Glynn, Dunning, and AYeddorburn, as Lord 
Chatham thankfully acknowledged, " stood with much dignity 
and great abilities for the transcendent object now at stake." 
The day, said the old statesman, was a good and a great one 
for the public. 

But the House, while it consented to be edified by the law- 
yers, looked, as its custom is, for amusement to the laymen, 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 293 

and did not look in vain. The contribution wliicli Cliai-les 
Fox made towards tlie entertainment of his colleagues is in- 
teresting as the best preserved specimen of his first manner. 
His early speeches were glaringly deficient on the side both 
of reason and morality ; and althongh his rhetoric had a cer- 
tain grace of its own, which may be described as the beaute 
du diable of oratory, he seldom was on his feet for three min- 
utes without committing some offence against taste, and even 
against ordinary propriety. But his youthful efforts had this 
in common with his mature performances, that, while he at- 
tacked it from the wrong quarter, he never failed to go di- 
rect to the, heart of the argument. The young Lord of the 
Admiralty, in this his third session, had already an eye for 
the point of a debate as sure as that of a heaven-born general 
for the key of an enemy's position ; and the memorable de- 
bate of the sixth of December, 1770, as he clearly saw, turned 
on the point whether, in a trial of libel, the bench or the box 
should be intrusted Avith the duty of giving what was in 
trutli a verdict of guilt or innocence. Choosing his ground 
with more skill than scruple, he undertook to maintain the 
preposterous thesis that to refuse to a judge, when sitting on 
a case of libel, a power which he did not possess when sitting 
on a case of murder was an insult to the ermine. And then, 
by a politic diversion, managed with quite sufficient adroit- 
ness to impose upon people who did not look too closely into 
any device which enabled them to get their opponents round- 
ly and cleverly abused, he sallied forth into the tempting 
field of general politics, and in a torrent of nervous and ve- 
hement interrogatories which concealed the poverty of his 
matter and the ludicrous unfairness of his taunts, he re- 
proached Glynn and his friends M'ith having called for a dis- 
solution of the Parliament on the plea that it no longer rep- 
resented the people. 

"What are you about?" he cried to the supporters of the 
motion. " You have yourselves allowed that you are no legal 
House of Commons; that you are de facto and not de jure ; 
and you are going to arraign the venerable judges of West- 
minster Hall, and enter upon a revision of the laws of the 



294: THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

land. What have yon been doing for these h^st two years but 
rinsjing constantly in our ears the contempt in which we are 
held by the people? Have you not made these walls inces- 
santly echo with the terms of reproach wliich you allege to 
liave been cast upon us by men of every degree — high and 
low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned ? Were we not, and 
are we not still, according to your account, held in universal 
detestation and abhorrence ? Does not the whole empire, from 
one end to the other, reckon us ecpially weak and wicked ? 
How can you, then, with a serious face, desire us to undertake 
this inquiry in order to satisfy the people ? The people, if 
your former assertions are to be credited, will get ^lo good at 
your hands. Who do you think will pay any attention to your 
authority ? From your former confessions, have they the 
right? They cannot. If they take you at your own words, 
hold you or your debates in any other light than the idle 
declamations of coffee-house politicians. I have heard a great 
deal of the people, and the cries of the people, but where and 
how am I to find out their complaints? As far as my in- 
quiries have led me, those complaints do not exist ; and as 
long as that is the view of the majority of this House (who 
themselves are the people, as being their legal representatives), 
I shall continue to think with them." 

The first speech of a new minister, for any human nature 
that it shows, is apt to be on a level with the diploma picture 
of a Royal Academician ; but such had not been the case 
here. Burke rose later in the evening ; and, though four 
speakers had intervened between him and Fox, the practised 
statesman considered himself bound to exert all his powers in 
order to efface the impression which had been wrought by the 
orator of one-and-twenty. He treated with magnificent dis- 
dain the pretension to speak for the nation which had been 
put forward by one who spoke for nothing except a peer and 
his hay-field. " You the representatives of the people !" he 
exclaimed to the long rows of borough-mongers who were sit- 
ting impatient for the vote. " You are so far from being the 
representatives of the people that you do not know their 
faces." At far greater length, and with a profusion of gor- 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 295 

geous imagery that is now as marvellous to the student as it 
then was distasteful to hearers who disagreed with the conclu- 
sions which it adorned, he exposed the full absurdity of the 
plea that to advocate a revision of the law was to cast doubts 
upon the integrity of the judges. If any one will be at the 
pains — the amply rewarded pains — to read aloud twenty con- 
secutive sentences from these speeches of Burke and of Fox, 
however much he may be personally convinced that the for- 
mer was wholly in the right and the latter indefensibly in the 
wrong, he will readily understand M'hicli of the two would be 
most acceptable to a mob of gentlemen who had had too much 
wine with their dinners, and saw themselves rapidly losing 
the hope of getting enough sleep in their beds.' Quite apart 
from the substance of what they respectively were saying. Fox 
pleased where Burke wearied, and occasionally even repelled ; 
and the merits, or rather the defects, of the cause espoused by 

^ "My sole object," said Burke, "in supporting the proposed inquiry 
is the public welfare and the acquittal of the judges. Till this step is 
taken, in vain do they pretend to superior sanctity. In vain do some gen- 
tlemen tread their halls as holy ground, or reverence their courts as the 
temples of the Divinity. To the people they appear the temples of idols 
and false oracles; or rather as the dwellings of truth and justice con- 
verted into dens of thieves and robbers. For what greater robbers can 
there be than those who rob men of their liberties ? No man here has a 
greater veneration tlian I have for the doctors of the law; and it is for 
that reason that I would thus render their characters as pure and unsul- 
lied as the driven snow. But will any of you pretend that this at present 
is the case ? Are not their temples profaned ? Has not pollution entered 
them, and penetrated even to the Holy of Holies ? Are not the priests 
suspected of being no better than those of Bel and the Dragon, or rather 
of being worse than those of Baal ? And has not the fire of the jjeople's 
wrath almost consumed them?" Let anybody who jiossesses even the 
rudiments of an imagination depict to himself the effect of such a string 
of questions addressed to a noisy House of Commons within half an hour 
of midnight. The jiassage which follows is still more painfully over- 
drawn, and might well have been regarded as blasphemous even by less 
jealous defenders of religion than the gentlemen who had expelled 
Wilkes for impiety. If portions of it had not been taken down at the 
time by Mr. Henry Cavendish, it would be diificult to believe that it ever 
could have been spoken. 



296 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

tlie younger advocate rendered his eloquent effrontery irre- 
sistibly attractive to an assembly which was wanting alike in 
the dio-nity of a senate and in the business-like self-respect of 
a o-enuinely representative body. The House refused an in- 
quiry by a great majority, which, when the question was re- 
newed in the course of the next session, was sw^elled into a 
very great majority indeed. The law of libel remained in a 
condition of perilous uncertainty until, after the lapse of two- 
and-twenty years — just in time to shield the wn-iters of the 
popular party from the most formidable judicial persecution 
that had menaced it since the Stuarts — Fox, with the assist- 
ance of the aged Camden, carried through Parliament a bill 
which vindicated the rights of juries as against the claims 
of the bench, and secured that no critic of the government 
should be arbitrarily punished on the pretext that, in the 
performance of what is essentially a public service, he had in- 
flicted a private injury. 

But there was something which the members of that bad 
Parliament liked even less than criticism. It was of small 
avail that Publius Valerius and Mucins Scsevola should be re- 
strained from calling them tyrants and mercenaries in the 
newspapers as long as their constituents had the opportunity 
of reading what they themselves said in debate. Conscious 
of belonging to the class wnth regard to whom truth is the 
worst of libels, Lord North and his followers esteemed the re- 
porter an equally dangerous enemy with the pamphleteer, and 
were short-sighted enough to imagine that he could be the 
more easily crushed of the two. The campaign began in the 
House of Lords. On the twenty-second of November, ITTO, 
Chatham, in a speech of extraordinary power, had inveighed 
against all who lived by the plunder of their country, from 
the lofty robber of Asia drawn in his coach-and-six, or his 
coach-and-eight, down to the broker who walked on foot to 
'Change Alley w^itli a scrap of secret information which had 
been whispered into his ear by a minister. The Peers would 
not have cared how often their distinguished colleague might 
ease his soul by declaiming against peculation and corruption, 
as long as they were comfortably shut up by themselves to 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 297 

sneer and listen. But it was a verj different matter when the 
one man in England whose words had real weight used the 
floor of their House as a platform from which to address his 
nncom^Jroniising philippics to the more numerous public out- 
side, who had no part in the taxes but to pay them, and noth- 
to do with coaches except to count the horses. The ministers 
were already deliberating on the measures to be taken for 
damming up the eloquence of their terrible adversary behind 
barriers within which it could work little harm to them or to 
their system, when their movements were quickened by an 
attack of an unexpected nature fi'om a hardly less ominous 
quarter. It was Philip Francis, as we now know, who had 
taken down from memory and given to the world the speech 
of the twenty-second of JSTovember; and in such hands it is 
needless to say that Chatham's invective had lost nothing of 
its terrors. And now, on the seventh of December, there ap- 
peared in Mr. Woodf all's journal a passage from a speech of 
the Duke of Grafton, which bore only too evident signs of 
having been reported with literal fidelity, accompanied by the 
unsparing comments of a critic who signed himself Domitian, 
and who was as much Junius as Junius was Phih'p Francis. 
The blow was too severe for the courage even of the boldest. 
It was sufiiciently disagreeable for the supporters of the gov- 
ernment to be held up to odium in the phrases of the greatest 
living orator, sharpened, as if they had not point enough al- 
ready, by the vindictive industry of the most formidable 
among living writers. But that ordeal was nothing to the 
discovery that they themselves were liable to be denied the 
services of the gentle art which lends eloquence to the stam- 
merer, and concentration to the diffuse, and something of log- 
ic and sequence to the incoherent observations of the dull. 
What had been uttered outright, without a thought of the 
morning's reckoning, might be served up on the morrow, un- 
revised, uncorrected, unexpurgated — punctuated with such in- 
fernal skill as to reproduce a lively image of the least admira- 
ble peculiarities in the speaker's manner — for the entertain- 
ment of a public that, in its ignorant self-conceit, had nothing 
of the indulgent fellow-feeling with which the House of 



298 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

Commons, and still more the House of Lords, regards a min- 
ister who is summoned to discourse at a moment's notice on a 
question over which he has never expended a moment's 
study. Few, indeed, were the politicians who could face with 
composure the prospect of standing daily in such a pillory. 

The emei'gency was just one of those which the govern- 
ment felt itself capable of meeting. On the third day after 
Domitian's letter had been printed, the Duke of Manchester 
was calling the attention of the Lords to the defenceless state 
of the nation, which was then in the thick of what still prom- 
ised to be a very pretty quarrel with Spain. He had got into 
the middle of a sentence about a ship that was laid up at 
Gibraltar on account of her not being snificiently water-tight 
to keep the sea, when Lord Gower rose, and desired that the 
House might be cleared of strangers. How, he asked, were 
their lordships to know whether there might not be emissa- 
ries of Spain under their gallery, spying out the weakness of 
the Britisli navy. He had in his pocket the speech of a noble 
lord, printed from notes which some nameless individual had 
contrived to take ; and what one unscrn])ulons person had 
done in order to gratify the curiosity of the London coffee- 
houses, another would find means to effect for tlie informa- 
tion of the Court of Madrid. There was a standing order 
that none should enter their doors except those who were 
there by right, and it was high time that such order should 
be enforced. The Duke of Richmond exclaimed energetically 
against a step the motives of which were more than suspicious ; 
and he was in the course of suggesting that the disclosures 
which Lord Gower and the Bedfords anticipated wnth well- 
founded uneasiness related to the leaky condition of the Ex- 
chequer rather than of the Mediterranean fleet, wdien a tumult 
arose such as never again was heard within those walls until 
the famous half-hour when William the Fourth was on his 
way from the palace to dissolve his flrst Parliament. Then, 
as on the other rare, and almost secular, occasions when the 
Lords have broken bounds, the need Avas sorely felt of those 
efficacious methods for restoring order which in the last re- 
sort may be employed by the Speaker of the Commons for 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 299 

the coercion of what is ordinarily the more boisterous assem- 
blj. The remonstrances of tlie decorous and sober-minded 
among the Peers were drowned in an ignoble clamor. Under 
cover of the general confusion, Chatham was subjected to in- 
sults on which braver men than those who now hooted and 
jeered him would never have ventured had his voice been 
audible. The Court lords, determined that no one should 
call upon them to defend their proceedings, continued to roar, 
" Clear the House !" with a din through which the Scotch ac- 
cent was plainly distinguishable. At length the Duke of 
Richmond lost his patience. "Clear the House!" he cried. 
" So you will, of every honest man ;" and out he walked, fol- 
lowed by a train of peers which in character and in number 
bade fair to accomplish his prediction. Their departure was 
the signal for a fresh outburst of unmannerly violence. When 
it was noticed that the servants of the House seemed reluc- 
tant to drag forth by their coat-sleeves such intruders as Burke 
and Dunning,' a party of lords made a rush at those members 
of the Commons who were standing at the bar, and drove 
them helter-skelter into the lobby. The unseemly riot was 
headed by two peers, on the prominence of whose noses Barre 
afterwards descanted with an angry exaggeration which indi- 
cated how gladly, in any place where they were not protected 
by privilege, the fiery soldier would have pulled them. The 
members of the Commons, charged, as they were, with the 
duty of presenting a bill to the Upper House, insisted upon 
being allowed to return and perform their errand. Lord 
Mansfield, who, while the great seal was in commission, acted 
as Speaker in the Lords, came forward from his place to meet 
them. They made their three bows, and delivered their mes- 
sage. Lord Mansfield had got back to the woolsack, "as a 
cricketer," said Sir George Savile, "gets back to his wicket," 

'"When the deputy black rod,'' said Burke, " pulled nie by this arm, 
I seemed not to feel any personal resentment; because the deputy black 
rod is no very gigantic man, and he is, besides, a friend whom for many 
reasons I love and honor." Dunning was among the most angry. "I 
went" (so he informed the Commons) " to the House of Lords, not to lis- 
ten to their ridiculous debates, but to say a few words to a member of it." 



300 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

when the indignant deputation was once more expelled amidst 
a volley of the exclamations with which the sixj^enny gallery 
was accustomed to decide the fate of a bad actor in those 
days of dramatic rigor. "Such a scene," said Francis, "I 
never saw since the damning of the French dancers." 

When the ejected members were safe within their own pre- 
cincts, and had made their statement about the usage to which 
they had been exposed, the self-respect of gentlemen for a mo- 
ment associated all parties in a common determination to re- 
sent so intolerable an affront. The first to call for a policy 
of retaliation was no less devoted a ministerialist than Mr. 
George Onslow ; and he was seconded by so keen a Whig as 
William Burke, who had come straight from a place which he 
ventured to describe as a bear-garden in presence of an audi- 
ence, the older among whom knew what a bear-garden really 
was. Such was the irritation excited among the adherents of 
the cabinet bj^ the explosion of a plot which the cabinet itself 
had hatched that consequences very embarrassing to the gov- 
ernment would inevitably have ensued if the House of Com- 
mons liad been left for another half-hour to the guidance of 
its own unprompted instincts. Few would care to risk an 
established, and still fewer a growing, reputation by running 
counter to a sentiment which appeared to be as universal as 
it was natural ; but Charles Fox had got from Lord Holland 
a courage and a readiness which formed almost the only por- 
tion of his inheritance, mental or material, that he retained 
through life.' The fiercer the storm, the more completely in 
his element was one who possessed beyond his fellows that 
willingness "to go out in all weathers" which Gerard Hamil- 
ton,^ with the appreciative envy of a vain and timid speaker, 

1 So visible was the stamp of his paternity on all which Charles Fox 
said, and on his manner of saying it, that the reporters of those days 
could not refrain from lireaking into their account of the parliamentary 
business to observe that the lad looked the very image of his father.— 
Parliamentary History, January 25, 1771. 

"^ Hamilton used this expression to Lord Charleraont with reference to 
John Hely Hutchinson, whom most assuredly the dirtiest weather never 
kept in port as long as there was a prospect of salvage-money. Of Ham- 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 301 

pronounced to be the quality of all others that made an in 
estimable debater. Putting himself calmly but resolutely in 
the front of his flustered otticial superiors, the junior lord re- 
minded the House that decisions taken in wrath were apt to 
be repented at leisure; that to requite insult with insult was 
not the right way of asserting its dignity ; and that the blow 
which, by an unlucky accident, had fallen upon members of 
their honorable body was meant for the common enemies of 
political mankind, the printers. When the supporters of the 
government heard a young gentleman who might so safely 
be trusted to adopt the illiberal view of every controversy 
arguing so confidently against the prevailing opinion of the 
moment, they began to perceive with consternation how nearly 
they had been betrayed by their feelings into giving a vote 
which would have gratified their fellow-countrymen. Their 
speeches became first moderate in tone, and then ambiguous 
in tendency, until the debate took a turn which provided them 
with an excuse for definitely separating themselves from the 
Opposition. Before the sitting was over, the ministers had 
recovered their customary majority ; and, to complete their 
luck, the question soon passed into the hands of the most un- 
desirable of champions. Lord George Sackville, or rather Lord 
George Germaine ; for that nobleman, along with a large ac- 
cession of fortune, had recently acquired the more valuable 
legacy of a new name. Lord George announced himself as 
having devised a scheme for maintaining tlie honor of the 
House ; but before his plan, which was elaborate almost to 
grotesqueness, had been discussed for half an evening, he had 
been told that the honor of the House had better be com- 
mitted to somebody who had proved that he could take care 
of his own. The words were from the mouth of a noted 
duellist, who seven years before had thrown down his glove 
to Wilkes; and they were spoken at the instigation of Sir 
James Lowther, who liked to get his quarrels fought for him, 



ilton himself Lord Charlemoiit said " that lie was the only speaker, among 
the many he hud heard, of whom he could say with certainty that all his 
speeches, however long, were written and got by heart." 



302 THE EAllLY IIISTOUY OF [Chap. VIII. 

though, ill the last resort, he never lacked the courage to fight 
them himself. Lord George had at last the opportunity of 
showing that the fatal liesitation which lost him his chance 
of making Minden another Blenheim had nothing to do with 
the fear of a horse-pistol. His conduct on the ground, and 
during the still more trying period that preceded the meet- 
ing, cleared him effectually and forever from the most pain- 
ful of all imputations to the satisfaction of everybody but the 
king, who could not bring himself to acknowledge the courage 
of a politician who did not happen at the time to be voting 
with the Court.' Parliament, meanwhile, in the rapt attention 
with which it invariably watches a personal incident, lost sight 
of its corporate grievances ; and an estrangement which had 
nearly brought the Houses into open war settled down into 
an affectation of sulkiness in their mutual relations, which 
was not likely to be enduring in the case of two assemblies 
so cordially in unison as to the principles on which the nation 
ought to be governed.^ 

A hard frost, which kept even hunting-men in town during 
the Christmas holidays, enabled the supporters of the govern- 
ment in the Commons to enlio-hten themselves as to the real 



' Before placing himself opposite an adversary who meant mischief, 
and came within a hair's-breadth of doing it, Lord George took four 
days to settle his affiairs, and make provision for an infant son a week 
old ; behaving all the while, as we are told by one who disliked him, 
with a cheerful indifference that deceived liis wife and his whole fhmily. 
The delilieration with which he carried through the affair was unfavora- 
bly interpreted by his sovereign. " Lord George Geruiaine," wi'ote George 
the Third to the prime-minister, "permitting so many days to elapse be- 
fore he called Governor Johnston to an account for the words lie made 
use of on Friday, does not give much idea of his resolution, but that he 
had at length been persuaded by his friends to take this steji." 

^ Late in the session the Lords amended a money bill by striking out 
the jjrovisions whicli offered a bounty upon the exportation of corn. The 
Commons, more mindful of their ancient privileges than of the doctrines 
of what was then the most recent among the sciences, resented the af- 
front by doing that of which their better-mannered successors only talk. 
The Speaker tossed the bill over the table ; and members of both parties, 
as they went out, kicked it along towards the door. 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAxMES FOX. 303 

meaning; and object of tlie course tliat had been pursued in 
the Lords. To be told how swiftly and smoothly business 
was carried on in the snug family party which the Upper 
House had become ever since it had been cleared of strangers 
was worth the loss of the best run which the Duke of Grafton 
ever gave the sportsmen who had earned at St. Stephen's the 
privilege of being invited to Wakefield Lodge in order to 
show that they could ride as straight as they voted. The 
ministerialists in the Peers were never tired of telling the 
ministerialists in the Commons how evident were the symp- 
toms of vexation in Chatham's countenance when he was re- 
minded nightly, by some fresh instance of neglect or imperti- 
nence, that, without the nation for an audience, his power 
was gone ; how the secretary of state hardly made a pretence 
of answering his questions about the evacuation of Port Eg- 
mont and the attitude of his Catholic Majesty ; and how the 
thunder of his eloquence, as with stately playfulness he not 
unfrequently confessed, fell dead against the faded hangings 
on which Flemish art had portrayed the defeat of the Arma- 
da — that tapestry which, " mute as ministers, still told more 
than all the cabinet on the subject of Spain, and the manner 
of treating with a haughty and insidious power." To see 
Burke reduced to the same helpless plight was a treat which 
the Tories in the Lower House were determined not to deny 
themselves; and they had this additional incentive to stir in 
the matter that, while the Lords had nothing to gain by clos- 
ing their doors except an agreeable immunity from the cen- 
sorship of general public opinion, the Commons, by the offi- 
ciousness of the reporters, were exposed to the more particu- 
lar and invidious supervision of their constituents. It was 
intolerable (such was the catchword in the government ranks) 
that gentlemen should be misrepresented to the people whom 
they were chosen to represent.^ In accordance with this one- 
sided but convenient view of the case, Colonel George 0ns- 

^ The words are those of Mr. Thomas De Grey, member for Norfolk, 
brother of the future Lord Walsingliam ; and the substance of them was 
repeated in every second speech that was made during thirteen evenings 
of February and March, 1771. 



304 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VHI. 

low, on the fifth of February, 1771, reminded the Commons 
tliat for any person to presume to give in the newspapers an. 
account or abstract of their debates had been decLared a 
breach of privilege, to be visited on the offender with the ut- 
most severity. The resolutions which embodied this imperi- 
ous doctrine, passed as long back as the first twelvemonth of 
the late reign, had been judiciously allowed to slumber by 
the common-sense of six successive parliaments ; but Colonel 
Onslow now persuaded the House to revive and enforce them 
by ordering them to be printed in the votes. The next move 
in the game was intrusted to one Sir John Turner, who, on 
an afternoon when Sir George Savile was to bring forward 
in a new shape the old question of the Middlesex election, 
took upon himself to desire that strangers should be excluded 
on the ground that the House was too full to be pleasant ; 
a pretext which immediately afterwards the ministerialists 
deprived of any semblance of plausibility by crowding noisily 
out to their dinners the instant that Sir George was on his 
feet. 

The London editors had begun to discover that their nar- 
ratives of the proceedings of a newly established debating 
society, or a certain club, or the Senate of Rome, or the Sen- 
ate of Lilliput, or whatever the pseudonym might be which 
in their prudent ingenuity they selected for the British House 
of Commons, attracted more, and ever more, subscribers as 
time went on ; and they were furious at the notion of such a 
blow having been struck against their interests by members 
whose reputation for being able to speak half a dozen sen- 
tences of grammar was due to the good offices of the reporter. 
For a month to come the whole legion of Gazetteers and Ad- 
vertisers and Posts and CJiVonicles brought to bear upon their 
puny tyrants a perfect deluge of the awkward and bom- 
bastic wit peculiar to the eighteenth -century newspaper, at 
which it is so difficult to imagine how the readers of " Tris- 
tram Shandy" could contrive to laugh. In every degree of 
false taste, and with endless variety of extravagant epithets 
and inapplicable similes, the world was invited to consider 
the intricate problem whether the colonel, who was the great 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 305 

Speaker's nephew, or the squire, who was his son, had done 
the most to render the name of Onslow ridiculous. The 0ns- 
lows, meanwhile, were busily engaged in carrying on the 
warfare according to their own notions of strategy — inter- 
rupting the serious concerns of the nation by complaints that 
one of them had been called " a sorry motion-maker," and 
the other " little cocking George ;" and moving that para- 
graphs should be read at the table, and printers hauled to the 
bar, and royal proclamations issued in the London Gazette 
offering fifty pounds a head for the apprehension of delin- 
quents whose crime consisted in having expressed the opin- 
ion that of two silly members of Parliament it was not easy 
to say which was the silliest. 

During some weeks the self-appointed inquisitors of the 
press took very little for their trouble. Their intended vic- 
tims were not so simple as to march into the lion's mouth. 
" You are like Glendower," said Charles Fox, who could not 
resist a quotation from the dramatists even when it hit his 
friends. " You can call spirits from the vasty deep ; but the 
question is, will the spirits come when you call them ?" The 
deputy sergeant, armed with the Speaker's warrant, attended 
eight times in one afternoon at the office of the Middlesex 
Journal, and was informed on each occasion that the master 
had just stepped out, but might be expected back at any mo- 
ment — a farce "which was repeated at intervals throughout 
the two follovv'ing days, until the servant who answered the 
door could not keep his countenance while he delivered the 
message. The more respectable members of the Commons 
were heartily ashamed of seeing Parliament committed to a 
contest in which its cause was as indefensible as its adversa- 
ries were insignificant. " The French Court," said Mr. Sey- 
mour, " issuing forth with their jack-boots and gilt coaches to 
hunt a little hare was an august and rational spectacle com- 
pared with the aspect of a senate bribing shop-boys to peach 
upon their employer." And the Iosj of dignity was even a 
less evil than the waste of time. Since the House last met — 
it might almost be said, since it was first elected — nothing had 
been done to provide even an instalment of the legislation 

20 



306 THE EAKLY IIISTOllY OF [Chap. VIII. 

which the ever-changing circumstances of a vigorous and 
growing community, then as now, miceasingly demanded. 
Admiral Frankhand, a brave and smart seaman who, when an 
unexpected death had turned him into a baronet and a land- 
owner, thought himself bound to come up to Westminster and 
lend a hand in doing the business of the country ashore, told 
his colleagues that in their quarrels about privilege they 
would show ill by the side of a parcel of sailors at Wapping. 
"Is there a word,'' he cried, "ever said in this House that 
leads to the good of the nation ? I hear so much of the honor 
of Parliament that I am sick of the very name." At length 
those M'ho held that the honor of Parliament demanded of it 
to show that it could produce something besides floods of 
barren rhetoric, and a fresh scandal every session, prevailed 
so far that an entire evening was devoted to a measure which 
would be of some practical advantage if carried, and which 
it required some experience and special knowledge to discuss. 
Sir George Colebrooke, the Chairman of the East India Com- 
pany, a man of mark in politics, and with a tincture of the 
learning which became hereditary in his family, presented a 
bill for enabling the directors to enlarge their European army, 
and beat up for recruits among the Roman Catholics of Ire- 
land. With Ilyder Ali parading his cavalry round the fort 
at Madras, the Company was likely, for some time forward, 
to have ample employment for bayonets of any creed. A 
debate ensued of high interest and importance ; the com- 
mittee on the bill was fixed for the thirteenth of March ; and 
the better men of both parties were congratulating each 
other on the House having, at the eleventh hour, settled 
down to work, when a piece of folly and mischief more fla- 
grant than any which had preceded it scattered to the Avinds 
all their hopes of getting something accomplished which 
would be of service to the public or of credit to themselves. 

The Onslows had alreadj^ been busy for some weeks before 
tlieir zeal met with approval in the highest quarter. It was 
not that the king entertained any sympathy for the reporters, 
or any glimmering of a notion that their humble but arduous 
calling was useful, or even innocent. " It is highly neces- 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 307 

sary," lie -wrote to Lord jS^ortli as late as the twenty-first of 
February, "that this strange and lawless method of publish- 
ing debates in the paper should bo put a stop to. But is not 
the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants 
before, as it can fine as well as imprison, and as the Lords 
have broader shoulders to support any odium that this salu- 
tary measure may occasion in the minds of the vulgar?" 
But as time went on, and the incidents of the squabble thick- 
ened, his Majesty began to feel the interest of a situation 
resend)ling, in many of its leading features, that memorable 
affair of the JS/^orth Briton, \Nh\Q\\ had hitherto been the event 
of his reign. It was like old days to read how Mr. Jeremiah 
Dyson, a retainer of the Court, for whose benefit a job was 
then being perpetrated which proved too much for the pa- 
tience even of tlie Irish Parliament, had been called " the 

d n of this country " by the St. James's C%ronicle in its 

account of the "Debates of the Council of Utopia;" how a 
bookseller had been ordered into custody for contempt be- 
cause, when he was invited to attend in the name of Mr. 
Speaker, he replied that he did not know any such gentleman, 
so that the message could not be for him ; and how Dowdes- 
well and Burke and Dunning had been overpowered by 
obedient majorities when they endeavored to recall their col- 
leagues into the path of manliness and prudence. Scenting 
the familiar battle from afar, George the Third insisted with 
Lord Xorth, who had never liked the business from the first, 
that the contest between Parliament and the press should be 
fought out to the end, however much the public peace might 
be endangered, and however many measures of public utility 
might have to be postponed or sacrificed. 

On Tuesday, the twelfth of March, Colonel Onslow, with 
an apology to his brother-members for showing them poorer 
sport than he could wish, announced that he should bring be- 
fore them three more brace of printers. His insolent levity 
met with a warm response from the dense ranks of the court- 
iers, who were present in ominous force, with Rigby for their 
fugleman, taking from him the word of command for their 
votes and the cue for their cheers ; while the prime-minister sat 



308 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIH. 

helpless, silent, and miserable, watching the assembly, which 
he was officially supposed to lead, disgrace itself as no House 
of Commons ever disgraced itself before or since. One such 
night was known during the crisis of the great Reform Bill. 
One such night will never be forgotten by the members of 
the Parliament which has lately passed into history. But on 
the twelfth of July, 1831, and on the thirty -first of July, 1877, 
the power of a majority was resolutely and even ruthlessly 
asserted, with the object in the one case of establishing the 
liberties of the people, and in the other of protecting the 
business character of the House of Commons ; whereas in 
March, 1771, the stronger of the two parties was contending 
for a cause as reprehensible as the tactics employed were vi- 
olent and unusual. From mid-day till morning the war of 
words and votes went on. The adherents of the Court (for 
those among the ministers who. were not king's friends by 
profession confined their exertions, to walking in and out of 
the lobby with an air of lassitude and disgust which they took 
no pains to dissemble) worked steadily through the list, mov- 
ing and carrying by tliree to pne, and five to one, and at last 
by seven to one, that such and such a newspaper be read at 
the table, and such and such a printer do attend at the bar; 
while the Opposition, on the other side, fought every case with 
a display of proficiency in the art of obstruction that was a 
century in advance of their epoch, and intercalated at least 
one motion for adjournment between each proposal of the 
government. Brilliant little spurts of oratory relieved the 
weariness, without improving the temper, of the combatants. 
Barre exclaimed against the inconsistency of setting in mo- 
tion the despotic authority of Parliament because an obscure 
supporter of Lord JS^orth had been called, more truly than 
civilly, a paltry insect, at a time when the grossest calumnies 
against so respected an opponent of the ministry as the Duke 
of Portland were published day after day by an adventurer 
whom the Earl of Sandwich had rewarded witli a living that 
was in tlie gift of the Crown.' A dispute as to which of two 

' Tlie assailant of the Duke of Portland was the Scotchman of Gold- 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 309 

members had been the first to get upon his legs drew from 
Burke a withering impeachment of the novel, imi^roper, and 
irregular doctrine of the Speaker's eye ; and the scruples of 
the great constitutional jDhilosopher could not be set at rest 
until an honest attempt had been made to define the proper- 
ties of that magic organ in a solemn declarator}^ resolution. 
The absurdity of the enterprise to which the British senate 
had stooped remains to all time reflected on the pages of its 
■journals. The childish malice of this attack upon the free- 
dom of the press, and upon the right of the nation to know 
how its own affairs were managed, inspired the defenders of 
those great principles with a grim humor that overflowed from 
their speeches into the formal amendments on which they 
challenged the decision of Parliament. When it had been 
resolved that the publisher of the London Packet should be 
summoned to the bar, a quiet Whig member, who had never 
before got nearer to a joke than an occasional stock-quotation 
from Horace, proposed that the man should be ordered to at- 
tend, " together with all his compositors, pressmen, correctors, 
and devils;" and Burke's ironical argument against striking 
out the last of the four classes is among the happiest samples 
of his lighter vein. When it came to the turn of a newspaper 
which had attempted to steer clear of the quicksands of priv- 
ilege by substituting in its report of the debates the names of 
constituencies for the surnames of their members, Barre moved 
that " Mr. Constantino Lincoln," and "Jeremiah AVeymouth, 

Esquire, the d n of this country," were not members of the 

House. Between daylight and daylight the two parties had 
tested their strength in three-and-twenty divisions, each of 
them preceded and followed by bitter mutual reproaches, in 
which the Speaker bore his part with an emphasis such as in 
our more sedate times would sound strangely from the chair. 

smith's "Haunch of Venison," who -wrote "Ciuna" and owned to "Pa- 
nurge." He was chaplain to Sandwich, and in January of this very year 
had been presented to the rectory of Simonburu in Northumberland. 
Sandwich's connection with the Church was, in more Avays than one, pe- 
culiar. He had two mistresses, who were respectively married to, and 
sought in marriage by, two clergymen who died on the gallows. 



310 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

Tlie government Lad begun the evening with a following of 
a hundred and forty ; but when, at five in the morning, the 
yeas for the last time had gone forth to be counted, barely 
half as many haggard and angry men filed past the extended 
forefinger of Charles Fox, who was acting as teller with the 
jovial energy of one whose usual bedtime was only just ap- 
proaching. 

WJien the House met on the Thursday, three or four of the 
printers appeared at the bar, and were reprimanded on their 
knees in spite of the most piteous assurances that their sale 
w^ould be ruined if they were forbidden to publish the de- 
bates. It took no less than twelve hours, and as many pro- 
cessions in and out of the lobby, to get this dismal ceremony 
accomplished in the teeth of the working members, w^ho were 
irritated at being kept from tlie Indian Army Bill, and of the 
Whigs, who were full of fight ever since their recent perform- 
ance, about which they showed an inclination to boast which 
excited the loudly expressed disgust of Charles Fox. Burke, 
who was never in greater force, found it necessary to make 
four speeches before he had said all he had to say about the 
satisfaction with which he looked back upon his twenty-three 
divisions. " Posterity," he cried, " will bless the pertinacious- 
ness of that day." But Burke and his friends needed not to 
wait till another generation for a recognition of their labors. 
Their resolute and patriotic conduct had aroused in the hearts 
of their contemporaries a spirit more than a match for the 
imwieldy and half-hearted tyranny of a House of Commons 
which was divided against itself. The citizens of London, 
who, with their compact organization and long habits of po- 
litical discipline, proudly regarded themselves as the regular 
army of freedom, saw that a crisis had arrived which made it 
their duty to take the field ; and their operations were plan- 
ned and directed by a general who had fought over every 
inch of the ground against far more formidable odds than he 
now was likely to encounter. Before the Speaker went to 
bed that night, there had been placed in his hands a packet, 
the contents of which could have left little doubt on the mind 
of one so intimately acquainted with the history of the past 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 311 

eight years as Sir Fletcher Norton that Wilkes had already 
his finger in the business. John Wheble, the same publisher 
who had kept the deputy sergeant dancing attendance for 
three livelong days in Paternoster Row, wrote to the effect 
that a person who represented himself to be an officer of the 
House of Commons had called several times at his residence 
with what purported to be a warrant from the Speaker ; and 
that, being better versed in printing than in law, he had 
thought it his wisest course to lay the matter before a learned 
counsel, a copy of whose opinion ,]ie begged to transmit for 
the information of the Honorable House. This production, 
signed by a Mr. Morris, of Lincoln's Inn, and drawn up in 
strict legal form — with case, questions, and answers all com- 
plete — was from first to last a piece of solemn impertinence, 
on which Voltaire could hardly have improved. It was no 
unlettered denizen of the Inns of Court who argued, with 
such abundance of subdued and apparently unconscious hu- 
mor, that the paper which pretended to be the Speaker's war- 
rant w\as so ridiculously worded as to deprive it of all show 
of authenticity whatsoever; that the paper wdiich pretended 
to be a royal proclamation, offering a reward for the arrest 
of an English citizen, had no force in a free country ; and that 
the gentleman whose comfort had been disturbed by these 
novel and unauthorized methods of annoyance would do well 
to institute an action against the promoters, aiders, and abet- 
tors of proceedings as oppressive in intention as they were 
nugatory at law.' 



' The warrant commenced with the words: " Ordered, that J. Wheble 
do attend this house upon Tuesday morning next." It was signed " J. 
Hatsell, CI. Dom. Com. ;" and, being issued on a Thursday, it was dated 
" die Jovis," after the ancient usage of Parliament which remained sacred 
down to February, 1866, when Latin was exchanged for English by unani- 
mous consent, as the first act of the first House of Commons that was led 
by Mr. Gladstone. It may be imagined with Avhat feelings worthy Mr. 
Hatsell, who had made out the warrant in accordance with the time-hon- 
ored forms, must have read the following passages in j\Ir. Morris's opinion : 

" 3. ' J. Wheble ' is a description of nobody. It might as well have 
been written ' eye Wheble,' or ' nose Wheble.' Either of them would be 



312 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIH. 

Wlioever might have been responsible for this harmless 
pleasantry, it was succeeded by a practical joke of a much 
more serious nature, the authorship of which was patent to 
the world. On the fifteenth of March, the day after he had 
despatched his letter to the Speaker, Wheble was arrested at 
his own desire by Carpenter, a brother-printer, who held that, 
however dubious might be the validity of a royal proclama- 
tion, there was no need to let fifty pounds go out of the trade. 
The captor and his victim went amicably to Guildhall, where 
care had been taken that Wilkes should be the sitting justice. 
The case was settled with a promptitude which indicated that 
the occurrence had been foreseen and the details minutely 
prearranged. Wheble was at once released from custody. 
Carpenter was first bound over to appear at the next quarter- 
sessions in answer to a charge of assault and false imprison- 
ment, and then sent off to AVhitehall to claim his reward with 
a certificate signed " John Wilkes, Alderman," which it is to be 
hoped may be still among the Treasury records. The next 
document thrown off by the handiest of pens was a letter to 
the secretary of state, reporting the steps w^liich had been 
taken by the Guildhall bench to mark the illegality of an ar- 
rest made in direct violation of the rights of an Englishman 
and the chartered privileges of a London citizen. This effu- 

as much the name of John Wheble as the former. Besides, a person is 
not legally named without a proper addition of quality and abode, which 
is not so mucli as attempted in this pretended order. 

" 3. The 2:)lace of attendance is not sufficiently exjn-essed. ' This House' 
is more properly the house of John Wheble, where the order was left, 
than any other house; for there is no date of place to the order. Mr. 
Wheble therefore best attended this order by staying at home. 

" 4. The date of time being expressed in a foreign tongue, which an 
Englishman need not understand, the day of attendance became conse- 
quently uncertain; 'Tuesday morning next' having no day, which it is 
next, to follow. 

" 6. If the House of Commons had power to issue this summons, it 
ought to be signed by the Speaker, and not by a person using certain 
cabalistic expressions which may possibly be construed to mean ' Clerk 
of the House of Commons.' " 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 313 

sion, which breathed the tone of humble "confidence befitting 
an inferior magistrate who has faced an unexpected diflicultj 
in a manner to win him gratitude in high quarters, was calcu- 
lated to produce a startling effect alike by the intelligence 
which it conveyed and the reminiscences which it awakened. 
It was not the first envelope in that handwriting which the 
secretary of state had opened; for the Minister of Home Af- 
fairs was once more the Earl of Halifax, who in 1703 had been 
one of the parties in the celebrated correspondence about the 
seizure of Wilkes's papers. Those had been days when to 
engage in controversy with a friendless outcast required no 
great courage in the master of thirty general warrants : but 
times were altered ; and to be addressed in a public letter b}'^ 
Junius was now hardly more trying to the nerves of peer or 
potentate than to be honored with a private letter by Wilkes. 
Halifax would have read with less trepidation a request for an 
interview from the solicitor of his largest creditor or his last 
mortgagee ; and, as for his royal master, it may fairly be said 
that, for the first and only time in his existence, George the 
Third was thoroughly frightened. Thrice in the course of 
five days did his Majesty sit down at his desk for the purpose 
of admonishing Lord Korth, whatever he did, to leave the 
most awkward of customers alone. The prime-minister — who 
had such painful reasons for remembering the royal letter of 
April, 1768, which charged him, on his loyalty as a subject, to 
see that Parliament reversed the Middlesex election — must 
have perused with a respectful smile the sentence in which 
his sovereign, in March, 1771, communicated to him the op- 
portune discovery that Wilkes was below the notice of the 
House of Commons. 

But the tardy repentance of the king did not carry him far 
along the path of caution. After another printer had been 
taken into custody by collusion, in order to be set at libert}^ with 
a flourish of municipal eloquence, a bona-fide arrest at length 
was made. Miller, the publisher of the London Evenmg Post, 
had been placed by Colonel Onslow on the list of proscription ; 
and a messenger of the House of Commons, calling at the 
shop, M'as unlucky enough to find his man at home. As soon 



314: THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

as a finger had been laid npon his shoulder, Miller sent for a 
constable, who appeared on the scene with significant promp- 
titnde, attended by a posse coniitatus of the neighbors. The 
Speakers ofiicer was given into charge for an assault ; and as 
many of the party as could squeeze themselves into a hack- 
ney-coach started together for Guildhalh From Guildhall 
they were sent on to the Mansion House, where Lord Mayor 
Crosby was awaiting them, with Aldermen Oliver and Wilkes 
as his assessors. The City dignitaries, who had no intention that 
the thing should be done in a corner, gave time for the news 
to reach Westminster ; and the deputy sergeant-at-arms came 
in state to rescue his subordinate and to claim his prisoner. 
The lord mayor replied by asking the Speaker's messenger 
whether he was a peace ofiicer legally qualified to make an 
arrest within the City bounds, and whether his warrant was 
backed by a City magistrate ; and when the man gave the 
only answer in his power, an order M-as drawn up committing 
him for trial on the charge of assault and false imprisonment. 
Crosby, whose courage was his best quality, though his char- 
acter was otherwise not disrespectable,' begged his colleagues 
to leave him the entire responsibility of a step the conse- 
quences of which could not fail to be perilous; and, turning 
to Wilkes, he said, in the hearing of the court, "You, I think, 
have enough on your hands already," But Wilkes, who never 
cared how much paper was flying about the world under his 
signature, insisted on putting his name to the order of com- 
mitment ; and an instrument which w\as nothing less than a 
declaration of war against the House of Commons went forth 
under the unanimous sanction of the magistrates who were in 
attendance to represent the Cit}-. 

Tlie leader of the House, if left to liimself, would have al- 

' Horace Walpole, "O'lio, though he approved the cause, took his cus- 
tomary jjains to collect all the dirt "which political hostility had raked up 
against the man, has furnished Crosby with the reputation of a low fel- 
low who had risen by mean arts. As a matter of fact, there is nothing 
worse against him than that he did three times what some of the most 
eminent patriots in history, from Washington downwards, have done 
once — married a rich widow. 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 315 

lowed the gage of battle to lie. There was no moment, late 
or early, at which Lord North was not prepared to let the 
matter drop, convinced, as he had been all along, that every 
fresh stage in such an nndertaking could only be more shame- 
ful and disastrous than the last. But the time was now come 
for him to experience what it was to be at the mercy of a 
stronger will and a weaker judgment than his own. As soon 
as what had passed in the City was known in the palace, the 
king despatched the first minister wdio entered his presence 
with a commission to tell Lord North that, unless Crosby and 
Oliver were sent to the Tower, nothing could save the Consti- 
tution ; and the verbal message was enforced by a letter couch- 
ed in the most stringent terms. But it was not George the 
Third's custom, on an occasion which in his eyes was a crisis, 
to rely either upon spoken or written words. Like all men 
of energy who are forced to act through others, he thought 
less of giving an order tlian of taking his own measures to 
have that order obeyed. The proceedings at the Mansion 
Plouse had not been concluded until late on the Friday even- 
ing; and on the Monday, as soon as the private business was 
over, the Speaker rose and, standing in front of his chair, ex- 
pounded to the Commons, in a long and circumstantial narra- 
tive, the nature of the insult which had been offered to their 
authority. His story met with a cold reception from a Par- 
liament which, having hitherto spent the whole of its corpo- 
rate existence in fighting the people, was not impatient to em- 
bark in a new contest that seemed likely to last until a gen- 
eral election reversed, most probably forever, the position of 
the combatants. After a fresh series of county meetings, pe- 
titions, and remonstrances had animated the nation and dis- 
heartened the Court ; after the liberty of the press had been 
drunk with three times three in every assize town in the king- 
dom, and another score of letters by Junius, on the most fer- 
tile and stirring of themes, had been thumbed to pieces in all 
the coffee-houses — to go then to the country on the question 
of preventing the country from hearing what was said and 
knowing what was done by the representatives of the coun- 
try would be to provide Chatham with a devoted and irresist- 



316 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

ible majority, to be used at will for the accomplishment of the 
purpose wliicli he had nearest at heart. And what that pur- 
pose was, no one who had an insight into his mind, or a hint 
of the subject on which lie most frequently and earnestly cor- 
responded with the statesmen who enjoyed and deserved his 
confidence, could for a moment doubt. With Chatham once 
more dictator, and Shelburne or Barre his master of the 
knights, the very first session would usher in an era of such 
searching and sweeping economical and parliamentary reform 
that few indeed of those gentlemen whose seats were now so 
secure and so remunerative would ever handle a Treasury 
bank-bill or see the inside of St. Stephen's again. 

When the Speaker had concluded his doleful and undigni- 
fied tale, the House looked in vain for guidance from the 
usual quarters to which, in a case of perplexity, it was accus- 
tomed to turn. No leading minister — no private member 
qualified by his standing and his character to be put forward 
as an interpreter of the government policy — would consent 
to play the part of adviser at a conjuncture when the single 
piece of advice that was not utter folly was such as a king's 
minister dared not give. Only AVelbore Ellis, whose name 
was a proverb for a hack placeman throughout the half-cen- 
tury when hack placemen went for the most in English his- 
tory — who had done parliamentary job-work for Henry Pel- 
ham, and who lived to be a mark for the boyish shafts of 
William Pitt — moved, with the air of one who, having learn- 
ed his lesson, was half afraid to say it, " that Brass Crosby, 
Esquire, Lord Mayor of the City of London, a member of this 
House, do attend this House in his place to-morrow morning." 
Very different men, speaking in far less uncertain accents, 
rose in rapid succession to combat the insane proposal. The 
assault was led by Sir William Meredith, a convert from Jac- 
obite opinions, who had not abandoned his ancient faith in 
order at once to worship the rising sun of a new-fangled ab- 
solutism. Ever since the time that Wilkes had first engaged 
the attention of Parliament, Sir William had borne his part 
in defence of constitutional liberty with a scrupulous fairness 
and an almost pathetic candor which won the good-will of his 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 317 

opponents, and were not always to the taste of tlie more im- 
petuous of his allies. His influence in the House was rather 
increased than lessened by his not aspiring to speak better 
tlian became a country gentleman ; but the occasion now was 
such that to be an honest man was almost equivalent to being 
an orator. Like a good cavalier, Sir William read a passage 
from his Clarendon to illustrate the dangers of exalting the 
privilege of Parliament as against the law of the realm ; 
but, without the help of quotation, his own downright lan- 
guage admirabl}'' expressed the energy of his honorable and 
manly apprehensions. " I wish to God," cried the old Tory, 
"that those who are involved in the labyrinths of this fatal 
proposition had consulted their judgments and then made a 
pause ! I desire to make my pause now. I came down to the 
House this day with a strong impression that I could take but 
one part, which was, if human wisdom could point out the 
means, to put a stop to this business. By whom this business 
was brought into the House I know. By whose dexterity it 
is to be got out of it I do not yet know. But this I know, 
that, unless you do get rid of it, I see nothing but mischief 
before you." 

Meredith was followed by Henry Herbert, afterwards Lord 
Portchester, and long afterwards the Earl of Carnarvon. A 
young politician, as politicians go now — though in a House of 
Commons which contained Charles Fox, thirty could hardly 
be regarded as within the age of modesty — he had before this 
been selected by his party to initiate debates for which Burke 
and Dowdeswell and Dunning undertook to provide the elo- 
quence, while Herbert himself contributed little bej^ond the 
influence of his high position and blameless reputation. But 
now, instead of repeating his wonted string of unimpeachable 
Whig sentiments arrayed in staid AVhig phrases, he astonished 
his hearers and himself by speaking his mind in words as 
plain and free as those in which his sailor namesake told 
James the Second, to his face, that there was a point beyond 
which even the loyalty of a Herbert would not carry him. 
Seconding Meredith's proposal that the House should adjourn 
till it had leisure to survey the precipice on the verge of 



318 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

which it stood, the young patrician adjured his fellows not to 
be hurried into a course that was detrimental to the true in- 
terests of their order. "I shall be told," he said, "that our 
dignitj^ is so nearly concerned that we cannot pause for a mo- 
ment. Is it for our dignity to be eternally at war with the 
people?" Lord John Cavendish, who stood on a level with 
Herbert in the esteem of Parliament, and was much more at 
home in an atmosphere which to a Cavendish was native air, 
sketched with a practised hand a vivid picture of the dangers 
and humiliations in which the House of Commons was aslced 
to involve itself. Nobody appeared on the other side but a 
few third-rate speakers, who endeavored to withdraw attention 
from the poverty of their arguments by taunting the Opposi- 
tion into a quarrel over the very driest among the innumera- 
ble bones of contention that remained on the battle-field of 
the Middlesex electioui At the first symptom of a riot, 
Charles Fox rushed joyously into the fray ;' but his attempt 
to create a diversion was sternly repressed by Savile. Reduced 
to argue their cause on its demerits, the supporters of the mo- 
tion spoke briefly, coldly, and most ineffectively. The heart 
apj)eared to be out of the business ; and the prime-minister, as 
he watched the glum faces that surrounded him, began to feel 
the inward joy of a trainer who has sold a cock-light when 
his bird will not come to time. It seemed impossible that the 
king, brave and pertinacious as he was, should insist upon the 
cabinet asserting a privilege of the House of Commons which 
the House of Commons itself was desirous to renounce. 

But Lord North did not yet know the master whom he 
served. Because the statesman who was in official possession 
of the royal confidence stood aghast before the enterprise 
which he was commanded to undertake ; because the great 
body of Tory county members, who hitherto had done their 

I " I beg to lay in my claim," said Fox, " that I should not be called to 
order. I wish to know whether it is disorderly to say that persons have 
I^resented to the Crown insolent and impertinent petitions." Such Avas a 
fair specimen of the interpellations by which the young senator tempered 
for himself the otherwise intolerable tyranny which forbade him to speak 
more than once in every debate. 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 319 

sovereign's bidding throngli evil report and good report, now 
Imng back from a eontliet which, thongh their ostensible foes 
were the City and the newspapers, was in truth waged against 
their own constituents — it by no means folloM-ed that George 
the Third was at the end of his resources. The time had come 
for him to remind his minister and his minister's supporters 
that lie had in pay a praetorian guard of his own, led by a 
captain whom nature liad framed for more honorable employ- 
ment. Sir Gilbert ElHot, the progenitor of a race which has 
inherited his powers and applied them to worthier ends, had 
been enrolled among the king's friends ever since the king 
had begun to make a party; and that he was incomparably 
the ablest of the band, if any one had doubted it, he was now 
to prove. At the turn of the debate, when another half-hour's 
hesitation would have set the tide racing towards a policy of 
caution, Elliot stepped on the floor with a promise of saying 
nothing that should inflame the House, and then proceeded to 
pour forth a declamation which had fire enough about it to set 
a Quakers' meeting in a blaze. He was there, he said, under 
no control from king or minister. It was the House of Com- 
mons that he meant to stand by — that House which was not 
an instrument to destroy, but to maintain, the rights and priv- 
ileges of the people. The authority of Parliament, so he re- 
minded his colleagues, had been denied. The sword had been 
drawn, but not by them. Civil war had been as good as pro- 
claimed ; and the people who were so hot for it must be 
taught that they were not the strongest. " If they come 
against us," he said, " with all their City behind them, I will 
not be the man to fall back. Are we, the Commons of Eng- 
land, the representatives of the people, afraid to defend the 
law and custom of Parliament against the Lord Mayor of Lon- 
don and two of the aldermen ? I never will cease to exhort 
ever}' gentleman who hears me — every man of family or es- 
tate or talent in this House — to defend its rights, and not to 
defer that defence by consenting to an adjournment." 

By the time that Elliot had done, the mischief was already 
irrevocable. There was no mistaking the significance of his 
tone, whicli was not so much that of the senator seeking to 



320 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

persuade liis colleagues as of tlie aide-de-eauip who has 
brought to an unwilling colonel the order to charge, and who 
speaks loud enough for the regiment to hear. His attitude 
was understood, and was intended to be understood, by the 
pensioners, who looked to the Court for their bread-and-but- 
ter ; by the lawyers, who within the last two months had seen 
the attorn ey-generalshijD given as a reward to one of their 
number for making an impudent attack upon the first princi- 
ples of liberty, and the solicitor-generalship to another as a 
fee for ceasing to defend them ; by the West Indians, who, 
with more slaves than constituents, cared nothing for running 
counter to a popular feeling with which thej'^ were not trained 
to sympathize, and from which as politicians they had nothing 
to fear ; by the East Indians, who, ambitious of the social po- 
sition which mere wealth, and, least of all, wealth with such 
an origin as theirs, could not buy, were enchanted at being 
addressed as men of family and estate, and having their course 
pointed out by one whose own fortunes gave such solid proof 
that he knew every turn of the avenues which led to worldly 
honor. All the tribe, without whose suffrages no government 
could then exist, enforced each of Elliot's periods with cheer- 
ing which told the prime-minister that it was no longer within 
his discretion to stay his hand. Burke replied in a speech full 
of political wisdom, of literary beauty, of allusions to his own 
history and his own personality — allusions from which the run 
of speakers do well to refrain, but which in the mouth of the 
very few who can venture to employ them are among the 
most exquisite graces of oratory. The prompt wit and digni- 
fied humility with which he accepted a very unnecessary call 
to order from Colonel Luttrell afford a model of the temper 
in which a great statesman should deal with an interruption. 
" The question of Middlesex," interposed Luttrell, " is not be- 
fore us. I cannot sit and hear the seat which I honor myself 
on holding called in question." " The honorable gentleman," 
said Burke, "has reason to honor himself. He is a greater 
man than I am. lie was elected in a much more honorable 
manner, by greater constituents." But Burke, though he spoke 
so as to carry delight and persuasion to every one who was 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 321 

not a jilaceman or a partisan, showed nothing of the aggres- 
sive and ahnost ehited air which had been remarkable in the 
members of the Opposition who had preceded Elliot ; and his 
subdued manner was exhilaration itself as compared with the 
despondency of the prime-minister. Never were followers 
more clearly forewarned that the enterprise to which they 
were summoned was a forlorn-hope, and that, whatever might 
be the case with the rank and file, their leader did not pretend 
to be a volunteer. In the three sentences which conveyed the 
announcement that the cabinet had resolved to push the quar- 
rel, the word "unhappy" occurred no less than three times; 
and the sentiment was so deeply imprinted on Lord North's 
countenance, and so evident in his demeanor, as to convince 
the fighting-men of his party that peace might be made at any 
moment, unless the government, through the mouth of one 
among its own members, was committed beyond recall to a 
policy of defiance. It was a rare chance for any minister, 
small or great, who was ambitious to display himself in the 
character of a mutineer and an incendiary. The opportunity 
was come for which a mother's pride had long been waiting. 
" I hope," wrote Lady Holland, in January, 1770, " that Lord 
North has courage and resolution. Charles being connected 
with him pleases me mightily. I have formed a very high 
opinion of his lordship, and my Charles will, I dare say, in- 
spire him with courage." And with the sort of courage which 
animates a general in the presence of an enemy when he is 
informed that a sub-lieutenant of engineers has taken upon 
himself to break up the bridges in his rear, North was now to 
be provided in abundance. 

The lord mayor, who sat for Honiton, was well liked among 
his brother-members. Even Colonel Onslow thought it a duty 
to bear testimony in his favor, and solemnly took his Maker 
to witness that he never should have expected such conduct 
from a gentleman with whom he had frequently drunk a bot- 
tle. Barre skilfully attempted to avail himself of Crosby's 
popularity in order to obtain him a reprieve on the ground 
that he was out of health — a plea with regard to which the 
House, it must be allowed, showed itself sufficiently sceptical. 

21 



322 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIIL 

Fox, who knew that the lord mayor was in all probability suf- 
fering from nothing more serious than was the matter with 
half the cabinet on the morning after they had dined with 
anybody except a bishop, began an energetic and most artful 
harangue by declaring that Parliament had no concern with 
questions of health or sickness. It was for the House to de- 
cree whether the lord mayor should be cited before it to an- 
swer for his proceedings; and tlien, if he was too ill to come, 
he must himself write and say so. Parliament (Fox went on 
to assert) would do well not to lend too credulous an ear to 
those who threatened it with the displeasure of the people of 
England. The people, in the language of certain gentlemen, 
was only another name for whatever class or group or hand- 
ful of men might happen at the moment to be in rebellion 
against the people's representatives. One year the freehold- 
ers of Middlesex were the people of England ; next year the 
citizens of London ; and now the meaning of a term which 
ought to embrace the nation had been narrowed down until 
it had come to stand for the lord mayor and a couple of al- 
dermen. The people (argued the young casuist) were correct 
in thinking that they had a stake in the contest ; but their 
interest lay upon the opposite side from that on which they 
were invited to range themselves. The controversy which had 
been so impertinently and so needlessly provoked was not be- 
tween the House of Commons and the people, but betvreen 
the people and the Crown. The lord mayor rested his case 
upon the rights of the City ; the charter which conferred 
those rights had emanated from the sovereign ; and the point 
of the dispute, therefore, was whether the king could, of his 
own will and pleasure, invest a corporation with the power to 
treat as non-existent an established privilege of the English 
House of Commons. " That privilege," he cried, breaking into 
a peroration before his hearers had leisure to examine too 
closely this most unforeseen product of his sinister dexterity, 
" is recognized by the people of England, and disputed only 
by three of the City magistrates. Every gentleman who thinks 
the honor of this House insulted and its existence at stake 
will be for the lord mayor's coming here to-morrow. There 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 323 

may be, as in all ages there has been, discontent among a por- 
tion of the people; but while we act agreeably to law we are 
invulnerable. I am sick of our lenient mode of dealing witli 
our enemies. There has long been a determination on the 
part of certain persons to bring the question of our privileges 
to an issue ; and even if we had let the printers alone, we 
should have had that question forced upon us within another 
month, or, at latest, within another session. It is from those 
who in their souls abhor and detest our admirable Constitution 
that this plot has sprung." 

The speech, which may still be read pretty nearly as it was 
spoken, explains the dislike and dread with which the speaker 
was then regarded by a multitude of politicians, humble in 
rank and zealous for their opinions, who ten years afterwards 
centred on him all their hopes, and twenty years afterwards 
would have died for him to a man. People of his own class 
— who knew \vhat a good-hearted fellow he was, and how lit- 
tle he owed to his bri-nging-up (if, indeed, he could be said to 
have been brought up at all) — forgave him much ; and those 
amouff them who had an insio-ht into character looked for- 
ward confidently to the day when the true metal that M'as in 
him would 

" Show more goodly, and attract more eyes, 
Thau that which hath no foil to set it off." 

But the great body of tradesmen and small freeholders, who 
were beginning to recognize the abuses of the system under 
which they lived, and to talk eagerly and seriously of those 
reforms which between their time and ours have made Eng- 
land another and a better country, might be excused for re- 
garding Charles Fox as a young Hannibal, whom his sire had 
pledged from the nursery to the destruction of freedom ; with 
a forehead of brass and a constitution of iron ; whom the nine- 
teenth century would find still thundering with matured abil- 
ity and undiminished vigor against the claims of reason, jus- 
tice, and humanity. The impression produced by his youth- 
ful rhetoric on those against wdiose interests and convictions 
it was directed is recorded by a poor bookseller who had suf- 
fered many things of many secretaries of state, and who was 



324 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

constant in his attendance at the House of Commons on the 
frequent occasions when matters affecting liis craft were un- 
der discussion. John Ahnon, of Piccadilly, who published 
for Wilkes and other members of the extreme section of the 
Oj)position, thus describes the Fox of 1771: "He answered 
no arguments sensibly ; but he showed some ingenuity in en- 
deavoring to confound the reasoning of his opponents. Cun- 
ning, much life, more profligacy, some wit, and little sense is 
no unfair account of his performance. But he trusted to 
numbers, which beat all understanding." To be in the 
wrong and side with the strong on questions of civil liberty 
was the easy and agreeable apprenticeship of one whose high- 
est title to honor is that on those same questions, from the first 
year of his discretion to the last of his life, he was almost al- 
ways in the right and hardly ever in a majority. But so 
long as he was false to his future, fortune was true to him. 
The ardor with which the Wliigs commenced the debate of 
the eighteenth of March had been damped by Elliot, and was 
fairly extinguished by Fox. The discussion, killed by his ve- 
hemence, dwindled into a desultory conversation, succeeded 
by a division in which the Court, by two hundred and sixty- 
seven votes to eighty, carried the day against the efforts of 
its opponents and the wishes of its ministers. 

The king received intelligence of the victory in a spirit in- 
dicating that the calamities wdiich since the year 1763 had be- 
fallen his realm had taught him as little about the nature of 
the people whom he governed as he had learned from history 
before he began to have experiences of his own. 

"Though some o' the court hold it jjresuuiption 
To instruct princes what tliey ought to do, 
It is a noble duty to inform them 
What they ought to foresee." 

But the duty inculcated in those rugged lines was ill-per- 
formed in the circle which more immediately surrounded 
George the Third. So masterful that he did not love to as- 
sociate with people of forcible and independent minds as his 
daily companions, he was so kind that the honest folks about 
him were all but sure to be sincere and passionate admirers of 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 325 

any course which he might pursue; and, even when they 
thought hiui mistaken, they could not bear to cross him. 
With no one to offer advice Avhich was not the echo of his 
own purposes, he again forgot, as he had forgotten so lately 
and so frequently, that the enthusiasm of the English for the 
victim of a state prosecution was as certain as a fact in phys- 
ics. The citizens of London, whose grandfathers had made a 
saint and a martyr of the most foolish clergyman that ever 
turned tlie pulpit into a rostrum — and who themselves had 
made a hero and a martyr, and, what was more, an alderman, 
of as dissolute a politician as ever looked to Parliament as a 
sanctuary from the bailiffs — would now (so George the Third 
had brought himself to believe) acquiesce in seeing their own 
chief magistrate tried, convicted, and punished for the crime 
of defending their own privileges, if only care was taken not 
to thrust the transaction too prominently before their notice. 
Writing as if it were a question of saving an informer from 
being hooted on his way to the witness-box, or balking a 
popular highwayman of his ovation in the cart, the king im- 
agined that he had taken adeqimte precautions against a rep- 
etition of the scenes 'whicli had so often disgraced and dis- 
turbed his capital, when he recommended the prime-minister 
to conduct the lord mayor to Westminster by water " in the 
most private manner." With a little ordinary caution, and 
resolution something more than ordinary, on the part of 
North, the affair, according to his Majesty's forecast, would 
be " happily concluded ;" the Liverymen, when they were tired 
of waiting on Ludgate Hill for a procession which never came, 
would go back to their work and leave the lord mayor to his 
reflections in the Tower ; the newspapers would be silenced, 
the printers ruined, and the House of Commons as impervi- 
ously sealed to the public gaze as the Council of Ten at 
Venice. 

But the English of that day were not so different from the 
people who defeated Walpole's Excise scheme that they would 
be content to pay taxes the necessity for which had not been 
explained to them, and to obey laws the process of making 
which they had been forbidden to inspect. Nor did Crosby 



326 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

and Oliver approve the notion of being smuggled about Lon- 
don in a fashion derogatory to its municipal ruler and its par- 
liamentary representative. As they drove M'estwards together 
on their way to St. Stephen's, their coach passed between deep 
and serried ranks of citizens, well behaved, well dressed, and 
in a large proportion well educated, as might be judged from 
the character of the ejaculations that mingled with the huzzas 
which ran in one unbroken volume along street, hall, staircase, 
and lobby, from the steps of the Mansion House to the thresh- 
old of the Commons.^ For three minutes after the door of 
the House had closed behind the lord mayor, the cheering 
from without continued to resound through the chamber, and 
brought the trial of the seven bishops to the memory of those 
who sat within, however little most of them might relish the 
parallel. But though the associations which the scene aroused 
reminded the members then present that they were assembled 
in the capacity of a court of justice, very few of them showed 
any sense of the obligation to adapt their temper and their 
manners to the judicial standard. During the tliree days 
which were consumed over the preliminaries of the case, the 
supporters of the government made no pretence of imjiarti- 
ality, and little enough of common propriety. They groaned 
down the first member who opened his lips on behalf of the 
City ; and when Dowdeswell interposed a few words before 
the House came to its final decision, he was received in a fash- 
ion which proved that even an ex-Chancellor of the Excheq- 
uer must expect to be roughly handled if he attempted to en- 
lighten the minds of those numerous honorable gentlemen 
who were going to pronounce on a knotty point of legal pro- 
cedure without having listened to the argument. What sort 
of trial was this (asked Burke), to which jurymen flocked in, 
wiping their mouths, and bawling " Question !" and " Divide !" 
when one of their number, who had remained in his place, 
undertook, before they delivered their verdict, to put them in 



' " The crowd," said a writer in the OcntTemmi's Magazine, " during the 
whole passage to the House called out to the lord mayor as ' The people's 
friend,' 'The guardian of the citv's ricfhts and the nation's liberties.'" 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 327 

possession of tlio evidence which had been adduced while they 
were absent at their dinners ? Fox, completely in his element, 
enjoyed himself like an apprentice in an O. P. riot, and bore 
off the honors of the most scandalous among the numy tumults 
which interrupted and intlamed the proceedings. Barre, who 
took him to task for calling his colleagues assassins, and for 
speaking of men whose guilt was still unproved as criminals, 
paid him as high a compliment as ever took the shape of a re- 
proof by admonishing him that a member with his great abil- 
ities and acknowledged position as a leader might not plead 
inexperience even at one-and-twenty. 

What was done during those evenings was at least as M-ant- 
ing in decorum as what was said or shouted. The Speaker 
refused to read the letter in which Wilkes, who had been sum- 
moned to attend at the bar, respectfully declined to appear 
elsewhere than in his place on the benches. The House re- 
fused to hear counsel on the question M'hether the lord mayor 
could have acted upon a warrant which was not signed by a 
City magistrate without infringing the charters which, at his 
accession to office, he had sworn to observe — a course as higli- 
lianded as if, in an action of trespass, the defendant were de- 
barred from attempting to show that the land off which he 
had been warned was his own. And at length, mounting 
from informality to outrage, the ministerial majority ordered 
the clerk of the lord mayor to place upon their table the book 
containing the recognizance by which the Speaker's messenger 
was bound over to appear at Guildhall, and proceeded then 
and there to expunge the entry. On the very spot where the 
great men of the seventeenth century, in the presence of a 
frowning king, maintained that privilege of Parliament which 
was now perverted into a weapon for the discomfiture of lib- 
erty, their descendants were not ashamed to combine in a vio- 
lation of the law which a tyrant who had not three hundred 
others to keep him in countenance \vould never have dared 
to perpetrate.' Nor would even that shameless throng have 

' Chatham, in his review of tlie session, thus commented on tlie bad 
business: "These men, who liad allowed the prostitute electors of Shore- 



328 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIH. 

carried their audacity to such a length if there had been no 
defection from the small band who hitherto had remained 
true to the Constitution and to each other. But the most 
flao-rant act of treachery which stands against the name of 
any public man eminent enough to have the incidents of his 
career recorded for the criticism of posterity had, for the 
time being, placed liberty and legality at the mercy of their 
adversaries. 

No one conversant with the political literature of the mid- 
dle of the eighteenth century would deny that the members 
of the House of Commons who, as a class, then enjoyed the 
affection and confidence of their colleagues in the least ample 
measure were the lawyers. Something of their unpopular- 
ity may be traced to a social prejudice against men who had 
worked their way from an humbler level into a sphere which, 
but for their intrusion, the aristocracy M'Ould have preserved 
almost exclusively to itself; but the small esteem in which 
gentlemen of the long robe were very generally held was 
chiefly due to what Bubb Dodington and Henry Fox would 
have termed moral causes. Everybody (such would be the 
theory of those profound observers) was greedy; but the law- 
yer was selfish. Everybody was ready to change sides with the 
rest of the connection to which he belonged ; but the lawyer 
ratted alone, and at the moment which suited his individual 
interests. The Bedfords hunted in a pack ; the Pelhams ran 
in a couple ; but the lawyer pursued his peculiar prey with 
solitary avidity, and with a clamor which went far to spoil the 



ham counsel to defend a bargain to sell their borongh by auction, would 
not grant the same indulgence to the Lord IMaj'OV of London pleading 
for the laws of England and the conscientious discharge of his duty." 
The erasure of the recognizance, he went on to say, was the act of a mob, 
and not of a parliament. " We have heard of such violences committed 
by the French king ; and it seems better calculated for the latitude of 
Paris than of London. The j)eople of this kingdom will never submit 
to such barefaced tyranny. They must see that it is time to rouse when 
their own creatures assume a power of stopping prosecutions by their 
vote, and consequently of resolving the law of the land into their will 
and pleasure." 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 329 

sport of the entire field. It was hard enough that a barris- 
ter with a seat which he had bought cheap from some patron 
of a borougli who had overstayed his market should talk of 
himself as ill-used if he did not secure a recordership in the 
course of his second session, and a judgeship before the end 
of his second Parliament ; while a squire who had fought his 
county at every general election since he came of age was bid- 
den by the ministers to think himself lucky, and by Junius 
to consider himself infamous, if in the fulness of time his 
fidelity was rewarded by a place which hardly paid the rent of 
his town house and the wages of his chairmen. But it was 
positively insufferable that a quiet supporter of the govern- 
ment who, after much study and many misgivings, had screwed 
himself up to the determination of showing his leaders that 
he- could speak as well as vote should find himself forestalled 
at every stage of the debate by the fluency of men whose 
trade, as Chatham told them, was words. Whenever any- 
thing was to be said, there never was wanting an honorable 
and learned gentleman to say it, at five times the length of 
anybody else, and with the air of authority betokening a pro- 
fession which earns its bread by affecting to be infallible. 
But the county members knew well how to take their revenge. 
Their ears were at the command of anybody on whom the 
Speaker's glance might light ; but their minds were open to 
the advice of those, and those only, who resembled them- 
selves in position, in antecedents, in liabits of thought, and in 
the proportion which the number of their sentences bore to 
the weight of their arguments. Ten words from Conway or 
Savile went further than an hour of Sergeant Nares or Dr. 
Hay ; and there was nothing more sure to take with the 
House of Commons than an allusion to the difference in qual- 
ity of the attention which it paid to statesmen who were think- 
ing of their subject and to aspirants for legal promotion who 
were thinking of themselves. "The artillery of the laM'," 
said Barre, " has been brought down on both sides ; but, like 
artillery, it has not done much hurt ;" and on a subsequent 
occasion he entertained an audience which, in those days of 
gunpowder, always welcomed a military metaphor from such 



330 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

as had the right to use one, by comparing the law officers of 
the Crown to the elephants in an Eastern army, which with 
their noise and dust bewilder their own troops a great deal 
more than they harm the enemy. 

There was, however, one lawyer whom public opinion placed 
in a category apart from all others of his calling. Wedder- 
burn had first been heard of in London as a dependent of 
Bute ; but few even of those who disliked the favorite and 
disapproved his policy found it in their hearts to blame the 
young Scotchman for availing himself of patronage which he 
so sorely needed. A stranger amidst a people whose language 
he could hardly speak to be understood, and whose politics 
just then took the shape of ferocious hatred towards the coun- 
try of his birth, he might well be excused if among the vari- 
ous party leaders he attached himself to the first who showed 
him kindness. But as soon as lie felt his feet in the Court 
of Chancery and on the floor of the House of Commons — as 
soon as he had begun to think for himself with his hard 
North-country head, and to express his thoughts in the seduc- 
tive intonation which he had learned from an Irish actor and 
an Irish master of elocution — he lost no time in making it 
known that gratitude to Bute did not blind him to the dan- 
gers of the system of government which was practised by 
Bute's master. AVedderburn's first act, after he was natural- 
ized as an Englishman, was to declare for the liberties of Eng- 
land. So at least the Whigs, proud of their hopeful convert, 
were never tired of repeating, while the Tories listened with 
respect and admiration to an orator whose manner seemed to 
show that he was convinced himself, and whose matter was 
so carefully selected and arranged as to prove that he desired 
to inform, and not to mislead or dazzle, others. Both sides 
joined in regarding him as a forerunner of the eminent ad- 
vocates who, between his day and ours, have asked for no 
better lot than to hold the faith of their party, to be admitted 
to its councils, and to take their share in its defeats, its labors, 
and its victories.' 



'Lord Campbell asserts that Wedderburn's patriotism had all along 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 331 

Such vrere Mackintosh and Romilly and Follett. Such 
men are not hard to name among those who now wear, and 
honor, the gown. But Wedderbnrn had other views and oth- 
er ambitions. In constructing for himself a reputation for 
probity and pubhc spirit, he was simply manufacturing an 
article to sell. Doing deliberately and completely what feebler 
schemers did fitfully and by halves, he made it a point to have 
in stock not merely such hackneyed staples of commerce as 
legal skill and parliamentary ability, but the more precious 
commodities of the confidence and affection of his country- 
men, and an influence which extended into remote corners 
of the British empire. In Marcli, 1770, he had lectured the 
House of Commons, the ministry, and the king himself on 
their lawless proceedings at home with a severity which forced 
even the objects of his rebuke to confess that here at last was 
one who reverenced the law for other reasons than because 
he lived by it. In May, 1770, in words which thousands of 
people in America then quoted to each other with hope, and 
millions have since read with contempt and aversion, he de- 
nounced as wickgd and foolish the arbitrary taxation of the 
colonies ; predicted, and all but justified, their rebellion ; and 
told Lord North, in the only phrase which his own subsequent 
conduct did nothing to belie, that, until the fatal policy was 
abandoned, no man of honor would consent to be a minister. 
But by November in the same year his unerring observation 
warned him that he had sailed far enough on the tack of pa- 
triotism. Having taken the precaution of obtaining from the 
owner of the borough for which he sat free leave to make 
the best bargain that he could in any quarter that he chose, 
he contrived means for letting the ministers know that lie 
was to be bought, and then proceeded to exalt their apprecia- 
tion of his value by attacking them with more unction than 



been regarded with suspicion. If ever it was possible to gather with 
certainty what men were thinking a hundred years ago, the opposite 
conchision is tlie correct once. The evidence by which Lord Campbell 
supports his statement is a passage from Junius written five months after 
Wedderburn had changed his party. 



332 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

ever. The less confiding members of the Opposition at last 
saw throngh his game ; but it is painful to reflect that he de- 
ceived Chatham, and that the efforts of the old statesman to 
testify his esteem f or Wedderburn by closer and more fre- 
quent personal intercourse did something to frighten Lord 
North into concluding the business on the turncoat's own 
terras/ On the twenty-fifth of January, 1771, appeared the 
announcement that Alexander Wedderburn, Esquire, had be- 
come solicitor-general to his Majesty ; and it may safely be 
affirmed that no appointment has ever caused so profound 
and iinpleasing a sensation. The new law officer made a pre- 
tence of defending himself by putting it about that George 
Grenville had been his leader, and tliat, since Grenville's 
death, he was bound to no one. But it was a little too much 
to expect the world to believe that the cleverest Scotchman 
who had crossed the Tweed, and the sharpest lawj-er that 
ever hugged an attorney," wanted a mentor at the age of 
six-and-thirty to tell him that, if he took office, he would have 
to unsay promptly and publicly everything that he had said 
during the years that he had been active £^nd austere in op- 
position. He might be bound to no leader, but he was bound 
to himself — to his own solemn pledges; to his own well- 
weighed actions ; to the multitudes on either shore of the At- 
lantic whom he had taught to look upon him as their counsel- 
lor and protector. 

While the eminent men who spent their all for the cause 

^ On the twenty-second of November, Chatham begged for an oppor- 
tunity of exchanging sentiments with one " whose handsome conduct 
and great abilities" he cordially admired. A fortniglit later on he wrote, 
" Mr. Wedderburn, as I hear, did, upon the matter of juries' right to judge, 
speak openly and like a man. I shall ever truly honor him." Shel- 
burne, on the other hand, had begun to suspect Wedderburn before the 
end of November ; and it is evident that his doubts were shared by 
Camden. 

- Boswell took the opinion of his great moralist on the question wheth- 
er Wedderburn had behaved nnworthily in canvassing for briefs through 
the agency of a Scotch bookseller. "If I were a lawyer," said Johnson, 
" I should not solicit employment ; not because I should think it wrong, 
but because I should disdain it." 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 333 

which Wedderbiirn had sacrificed to the exigencies of his 
career did not disguise from themselves the disastrous conse- 
quences which couhl not fail to result from the treacher}'. 
tliey were mindful of their own dignity when speaking of the 
traitor. Camden reported the new ministerial arrangements 
for Chatham's information in language as dry and conven- 
tional as that of the London Gazette. "I make no remark 
upon all this," he added. "I am not surprised, but grieved." 
Chatham himself expressed his pain and astonishment in a 
single epithet. "The part of Wedderburn," he wrote, "is 
deplorable." But though the great judge and the great states- 
man showed a generous reluctance to avenge the wrongs of 
the public upon one who had so deeply injured themselves, 
there was no -want of people who were both able and M'illing 
to give the solicitor-general a foretaste of what history had in 
reserve for him. Churchill, indeed, was gone ; but the ad- 
mirers of Churchill exultingly pointed to the lines in which 
the author of the " Rosciad," his foresight sharpened by a 
literary quarrel, had prophesied that Wedderburn, then ob- 
scure and respectable, would live to attain a splendid infam3^' 
Horace Walpole spoke the sentiments with which men of the 
world, and of a world which was anything but squeamish, re- 
garded this act of unmatched and matchless duplicity. "I 
would keep a shop," he said to Mason, " and sell any of my 
own works that would gain me a livelihood, whether books 
or shoes, rather than be tempted to sell myself. 'Tis an honest 
vocation to be a scavenger ; but I would not be solicitor-gen- 
eral." Plain citizens, who were not sinecurists or fine gentle- 
men, looked to Junius as the interpreter of their displeasure; 
and Junius, conscious that he did well to be angry, spiced liis 
rhetoric during the whole spring and summer with epigrams, 
of which one, at least, embodied the opinion of mankind too 
compactly to be forgotten. " In vain," he wrote to the Duke 

* " To mischief trained, e'en from his mother's womb ; 
Grown old in fraud, though yet in manhood's bloom ; 
Adopting arts by whicli gay villains rise 
And reach the heights which honest men despise." 
The " Rosciad " appeared in 17G1. 



334 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

of Grafton, in June, 1T71, " would our gracious sovereign liave 
looked round him for another character as consummate as 
vours. Lord Mansfield shrinks from his princiiDles ; Charles 
Fox is yet in blossom ; and as for Mr. Wedderburn, there is 
something about him which even treachery cannot trust." In 
Parliament, the brother-members of the new law officer took 
the earliest opportunity of apprising him that he must hence- 
forward rely exclusively upon his talents, since his character 
was gone. When the writ for his re-election was moved, the 
House, usually so forward to rejoice with the fortunate at that 
supreme moment of political success, gave vent to its collec- 
tive indignation in a deep groan. When the day came for 
him to take his seat on the Treasury bench, he walked down 
the floor between the men whom he had so often denounced 
as false to their country, and the men to whom he had now 
proved false himself, blushing as red as fire ; and years after- 
wards, when Lord North was declaiming against the Whigs 
for talking of patriotism and justice while they meant noth- 
ing but pensions and places, all eyes were turned to the spot 
where the former associate of Rockingham and Savile sat, 
"pale as death," at the elbow of the prime-minister. 

Abandoned by their most capable champion, and exasper- 
ated by the insolence with which a Parliament which was nom- 
inally of their choice trampled at every step on some valued 
law or cherished right, the people of England, never so little 
like sheep as when their watch-dogs have deserted them, had 
at last been wrought into the humor for meeting violence 
with violence. It was expected that the lord mayor would 
learn his fate on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of March ; and, by 
noon on that day, all London was in the streets. The roar of 
an enormous multitude which escorted him to St. Stephen's 
and then waited at the doors to see him safe home, in a tem- 
per that foreboded worse things, was distinctly heard by the 
members who were debating within, whenever their own 
noise did not drown all external clamor; for the storm of 
controversy, which .was to rage without intermission during 
thirteen livelono- hours, beo^an as soon as the last word of the 
benediction was out of the chaplain's mouth. In consequence 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 335 

of the blunder of a Treasury official not accurately informed 
as to which among the national representatives was in royal 
pay, an independent Tory country gentleman had received a 
Treasury circular intended only for the courtiers. On open- 
ing his letter, the astonished baronet found himself requested, 
with the transparent decency of phrase that is customary in 
such missives, to vote as a partisan on an occasion when he 
was bound in conscience to discriminate as a judge.' The Op- 
position were justly furious. Sir William Meredith, remem- 
bering with pride that the sturdy resistance of the Jacobites 
to the attainder of Sir John Fenwick was the best service 
which his old party had ever rendered to public liberty, dis- 
coursed gravely and forcibly, on the impropriety of canvass- 
ing for a judicial sentence as if it were a question of a clause 
in the Customs Bill or an item in the Estimates. "It is con- 
trar}'," he said, "to every notion of law and justice to try 
these magistrates by a judicature three fourths of whom are 
prepared to condemn them." And it soon was evident that 
they were to be condemned unheard ; for the lord mayor, 
having been acquainted by the Speaker that his counsel would 
be debarred from arguing the very point uj^on which the case 
hinged, declined to go through the farce of allowing himself 
to be defended. Having silenced the professional advocates, 
the ministerialists were determined not to tolerate an amateur, 
and promptly shouted down an old-fashioned Whig who was 
so unnecessarily punctilious as to announce his intention of 
considering the matter under its legal aspect. 

But they forgot, in their impatience, that brute force was a 
game at which two, and, still more, at which twenty thousand, 
could play. As the afternoon wore on, every fresh member 

' " You are most earnestly requested to attend early to-morrow, on an 
affair of the last importance to the Constitution and the rights and privi- 
leges of the people of England." Such was the wording of the letter. 
Its meaning no one who has ever received a government wliip could for 
an instant doubt. A young member contributed a toucli of local color 
to the discussion which took place over the incident by describing how 
a Treasiyy clerk had been fetched from a ball at midnight to despatch 
the circulars. 



336 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

who entered, the House brought a more alarming report of the 
tumult which reigned without. Each new comer, as he turned 
into Palace Yard, was asked whether he was for the lord 
mayor ; and if he refused to answer, care was taken tliat he 
should remain in the company of the people long enough to 
make himself acquainted with their sympathies. One gentle- 
man was two hours in getting through the throng. Another 
was squeezed up into a corner, where, if his neighbors had 
recognized him as a Controller of the Board of Green Cloth, 
he would certainly have stayed for a much longer space of 
time than lie was accustomed to spend over the duties of his 
office. George Selwyn was with difficulty extricated from an 
encounter into which he had been provoked by the unendura- 
ble indignity of being hooted by mistake for George Onslow. 
The danger of the situation was increased by the mischievous 
conduct of Alderman Townshend, who had been brought 
down to the House, pale and bandaged from a recent surgical 
operation, in order to pour forth a diatribe against female 
caprice and backstairs influence — which fairly electrified even 
educated hearers, who could not quite get Bute and the Prin- 
cess Dowager out of their heads — and the mere report of 
which, if it had once reached the streets, might at any mo- 
ment have sent the mob across St. James's Park to Carlton 
House. The Speaker directed the High Constable of West- 
minster to clear the neighborhood; but the task was alto- 
gether beyond the limited and very unreliable force whicli 
that functionary had at liis command. Forty men were not 
sufficient, he said ; nor twice forty : and if he called out every 
peace officer in his district, he could only muster eighty trun- 
cheons. The magistrates, of whom six were in attendance, 
did something to disperse the populace; but Tories and 
Whigs alike were heartily relieved when the lord mayor 
pleaded bodily exhaustion as an excuse for retiring, and car- 
ried off his train with him. Unable to forego the delight of 
drawing a coach from Westminster to the Mansion House by 
torchlight, the crowd rolled away eastwards, and left the Com- 
mons happy in the prospect of being able to vote and go 
home to bed without running the gantlet of a legion of in- 
quisitive Wilkites. 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 337 

The matter which Parliament had in hand was such as it 
could not easily have justified to the satisfaction even of less 
hostile critics than those M'ho had been besieging its portals. 
When tlie lord mayor had departed, Alderman Oliver was 
called upon to make his defence ; and his friends replied by 
requiring to know the charge on which the ministry intended 
to arraign him. Charles Fox, who at tliis time in liis life was 
always ready to do freedom the good turn of exhibiting tyr- 
anny in its most hateful colors, settled the jjoint by laying 
down a new principle in criminal procedure, which the tribu- 
nal that he was addressing at once adopted by acclamation. 
" What we," he said, " shall move against tlie gentleman will 
depend upon what he shall say in his defence." Barre urged 
that midnight was not the hour for calling upon a court, so 
constituted and so advised, to deliver what was at once a ver- 
dict and a sentence; but Oliver himself pronounced against 
delay with a spirit Avhich astonished those among whom he 
had hitherto passed, almost unremarked, as a young fellow of 
quiet and refined manners, "I am not," he said, "in the least 
solicitous to postpone the business. An adjournment of one 
day, or ten, will make no difference witli this majority. I 
know that the punishment which I am to receive is deter- 
mined upon ; and I have nothing to say, neither in my own 
defence, nor in defence of the City of London. I exjDCct little 
from the justice of this House, and I defy its power." His 
honorable contumacy forced the ministers to show their hand, 
and they answered his challenge by moving that he should be 
committed to the Tower. 

The proposal, when seriously put forward in so many words, 
took aback even those who held themselves bound by their 
position to credit the government beforehand with the ex- 
treme of misbehavior and folly. The Opposition seemed 
dazed by the suddenness of the blow. Their tactics were dis- 
concerted ; all unity of action vanished; and every man took 
the course which his disposition prompted. Tlie more sober 
Whigs were prepared to release themselves from the respon- 
sibility of the step by voting against it ; but there were others 
who regarded the ordinary forms of protest as inadequate to 

99 



338 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

express the full depth and breadth of their dissent from so in- 
fatuated a policy. William Burke, civilly but significantly, 
wished the House good-night. Alderman Townshend took 
himself back to the bed which, for ev^ery reason, he ought 
never to have quitted. Barre began by telling his opponents 
that he should sj^eak daggers, and ended with epithets such 
that they could with difficulty refrain from using their 
swords.' As he w^alked down the House, after summoning 
every honest man and every friend of England to follow him, 
voices w^ere raised to demand that he should answer for his 
words at the bar ; but there was that in the veteran's counte- 
nance which informed all who saw it that they had best let 
him go in peace. Edmund Bnrke, too depressed, and perhaps 
too fatigued, to speak loudly or at length, warned the friends 
who sat around him, in a tone too low for any except them to 
catch, that by prolonging the contest they would effect noth- 
ing but to increase the scandal. " All debate," he sadly said, 
"all deliberation, is at an end;" and such, if not before, most 
certainly was the case after Charles Fox, in a speech of almost 
furious vehemence and quite marvellous dexterity, had excited 
the enthusiasm and bewildered the conscience of his party. 
Clutching tight hold, as he rushed along, of whatever plausi- 
ble argument his ingenuity could discover in support of the 
arbitrary and ignoble doctrines that he successively jDropound- 
ed, he never let it go until he had thrust it home with a skill 
and an impetuosity which for a moment persuaded that ser- 

' " These walls are luilioly, they are baleful, they are deadly, as long as 
a prostitute majority holds the bolt of parliamentary omnipotence, and 
hurls its vengeance only upon the virtuous. To yourselves I consign 
you. Enjoy your own pandemonium. 

'When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway. 
The post of honor is a private station.' " 

" I spoke, I believe, with great violence ; " so Barre confessed to Chat- 
ham after he had slept, or tried to sleep, upon the occurrences of this ex- 
traordinary evening. He seemed to himself to have been only five min- 
utes on his feet ; and it is hardly to be believed that the most conscience- 
stricken assembly of Catilines could have sat quiet for any longer j^eriod 
under such a blast of vituperation. 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 339 

vile and intolerant throng that, in muzzling the press and 
flouting the law, they were treading in the footsteps of Mil- 
ton and of Soiuers. In a peroration which a true Whig can 
hardly read no\v without being convinced in the teeth of his 
common-sense — and which sent forth into the lobby the sham 
Whigs who then heard it in such flocks that the government 
carried the question by four to one, with a dozen votes to 
spare — he exhorted his brother-members to guard their rights 
and liberties, the fruit of the Long Parliament and the Revo- 
lution, against the assaults of the commonalty, as their fore- 
fathers had guarded them against the encroachments of the 
sovereign. Taking his text from the events of that very af- 
ternoon — which had heated his blood, as danger always heated 
it till his fighting-days, and all days, were over with him — he 
confidently and successfully appealed to the instincts of an as- 
sembly of English gentlemen who had the shouts of a defiant 
mob still ringing in their ears. " The business of the peo- 
ple," he exclaimed, "is to choose us. It is ours to maintain 
the independence of Parliament. Whether that independence 
is attacked by the people or by the Crown is a matter of little 
consequence. It is the attack, not the quarter it proceeds 
from, that we are to punish; and if we are to be controlled 
in our necessary jurisdiction, can it signify whether faction 
intimidate us with a rabble, or the king surround us with his 
Guards? If we are driven from the direct line of justice by 
the threats of a mob, our existence is useless in the communi- 
ty. The minority within doors need only assault us by their 
myrmidons without, to gain their ends upon every occasion. 
Therefore, as we are chosen to defend order, I am for sending 
those magistrates to the Tower who have attempted to destro}' 
it. Convinced that we are here to do justice, whether it is 
agreeable or disagreeable, I will not be a rebel to my king, to 
my country, or to my own heart for the loudest huzza of an 
inconsiderate multitude." 

Kight or wrong, late or early — whether he was outraging 
the sentiments of the multitude or faithfully laboring for its 
interests — Charles Fox was never fated to enjoy much of its 
applause. He now received a proof (on which, in his youth- 



34:0 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap.VIII. 

ful eagerness to be conspicuous, he may be excused for ]3lum- 
ing himself as a sort of left-handed compliment) that, for his 
age, he was the most unpopular man not only in England, but 
in English history. Within two years of his maiden speech 
he had contrived to attract to himself an amount of active 
dislike equal to that which a few, and only a few, great min- 
isters have carried to the grave or the scaffold as the accumu- 
lation of a lifetime. 

On Thursday, tlie twenty-seventh of March, the case of the 
lord mayor came on for a final hearing. Fiercely resenting 
the condemnation of one of their magistrates, and arguing 
therefrom the measure which would be dealt out to the other, 
the citizens of London attended Crosby to the place of judg- 
ment wdth the air of men who, if the day went against their 
champion, were sternly resolved to know the reason why. A 
committee of four aldermen and eight common-councillors, 
who had been unanimously appointed in a full court to assist 
him with their countenance and advice, and pay his charges 
out of the municipal funds, attended him as his immediate 
body-guard. Then came a long 23rocession of merchants and 
bankers, shopkeepers and brokers ; while before, behind, and 
all around surged the population of the great capital, glad, as 
always, to make a holiday when their betters set them the ex- 
ample, and exulting in the anticipation of such doings as had 
not been witnessed since the day wdien — by a combination 
of circumstances and associations the like of which can never 
recur — tlie autiior of the JVorih Briton attained the age of 
forty-five. There M\as, indeed, every prospect of a glorious 
riot. The Guards, both horse and foot, were ready to turn 
out under arms at a minute's notice ; but there was not stand- 
ing-room for a single red-coat within three hundred yards of 
St. Margaret's Church, except what he could make for him- 
self with the butt of his musket or the hoofs of iiis charger. 
The civil guardians of the peace, of every degree, had been 
posted betimes upon the ground ; but there were almost more 
justices at hand to read the Act than ofiicers to enforce it. 
The constables were speedily disarmed ; and when Lord 
!N"orth drove up, he was sainted by having one of their staves 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 341 

thrust in his face through the carriage-window. After break- 
ing the glasses, the rabble proceeded to demolish the v^ehicle. 
Thej got the prime-minister out ; they tore his hat into a hun- 
dred pieces ; and there was a moment when the bystanders 
apprehended with horror that the scene which a century be- 
fore had been enacted under the archway at the Hague would 
be repeated in Parliament Street. But among those bystand- 
ers was most fortunately Sir William Meredith, who dashed 
in to the rescne with a courage which North generously ac- 
knowledged and handsomely repaid.' Sir William, from the 
exclamations which he heard around him in the scuffle, gath- 
ered that the treatment experienced by the First Lord of the 
Treasury was intended for the Junior Lord of the Admiralty — • 
a comedy, or, as it nearly turned out, a tragedy, of errors not 
calculated to increase the prime-minister's affection for a sub- 
ordinate who already balanced him in political weight as 
much as in the corporal bulk that was the point of resem- 
blance between them. Charles himself got off with less mor- 
tal peril than his leader, but in a still more woful plight. 
The populace, infuriated by the sight of any panels exhibit- 
ing those family supporters which were as little like foxes as 
the motto beneath them represented what had hitherto been 
the family practice," wrecked his coach, and his brother's like- 
wise. They pelted him with oranges, with stones, and even 
with handfuls of London mud. They rolled him and his fine 
clothes in the kennel ; the very suit, may be, that had come 
safe on his back across the Channel, on the occasion when a 
whole tailor's shop which he was bringing over for the yearly 
consumption of himself and his friends was seized and burned 
by the searchers of the Dover Custom-house.' The speech in 

* He gave a good living to Sii' William's brother. 

^ "Et vitam impendere vero." 

^ During the preceding winter a foolish paragraph went the round of 
the papers to the effect that Charles Fox had been sent over to France 
with five thousand guineas for the Comte du Barry, and a diamond neck- 
lace for the countess, as bribes to induce tlie pair to prevail on the King 
of Spain to come to terms with the English ministry on the matter of 
the Falkland Islands. The real nature of the errand which took him to 



342 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIIL 

which on the morrow he made his complaint to the Honse of 
Commons lias perished unreported ; and those who love to 
read a great orator on the stimulating topic of his own per- 
sonal wrongs would exchange the "Pro Domo Sua," and almost 
the "Midias" itself, for a sample of such eloquence inspired by 
such an injury. 

The Sjjeaker very properly refused to let business be trans- 
acted under the pressure of external intimidation. When the 
magistrates sent in word that they were powerless, he trans- 
ferred the responsibility of restoring the peace to the sherifl's 
of London, who luckily were also members of Parliament. 
Those officers (Wilkites both of them, or they never would 
liave been sheriffs) undertook to dismiss the crowd on the un- 
derstanding that it should not be called a mob ; and, with the 
help of some leading members of the Opposition, who accom- 
panied them into the streets, they persuaded four fifths of the 
people outside to go quietly home, and procured sufficient 
force to keep the remainder in bounds. But the zeal which 
the Whigs displayed in the cause of order did not deter their 
opponents from charging them with having planned and sub- 
sidized the riot ; and the calumny was all the harder to bear 
because the first suggestion of it came from Wedderburn. 
He who had taught his countrymen to agitate — who had 
never been so fluent and so fervid as when he was reminding 
crowded and excited assemblies how their less patient forefa- 
thers had dealt with administrations not so wicked (such was 
his favorite adjective) as that to which he now belonged ; 
who had publicly abjured the damnable doctrine that a reso- 
lution of the House of Commons could abrogate and annihi- 
late the law of the land — now declared himself unable to be- 
lieve that those very London citizens who had listened to and 
applauded his oath would have public spirit enough to array 
themselves on the side of the law against a resolution of the 
Commons, unless the statesmen whose friendship he so lately 
pretended to regard as his most cherished possession had 

Paris, aucl its disastrous issue, as above related, have been preserved in a 
small volume of his Ana, published -within a few mouths of his death. 



1770-71.] CHAKLES JxVMES FOX. 34:3 

Lired their services with drink and silver. Savilc had re- 
course to the only weapon with which men wlio are at once 
proud and upright deign to encounter treachery, and w^alked 
out of the House without bestowing a reproach on the apos- 
tate. William Burke, not caring to^ mince his words, pro- 
nounced the accusation an egregious falsehood. Edmund, 
with less heat and not less justice, desired the ministry to re- 
member that there were two ways of raising riots — one by 
paying the rioters, and the other by provoking them. But 
no one was so deeply hurt as Meredith. "May I never," he 
exclaimed, " find mercy if I show mercy to the man who set 
that mob on to attack the noble lord in whose defence I vent- 
ured myself !" 

It was amidst an audience agitated by such emotions that 
Korth delivered a speech which, feeble as long as he confined 
himself to his subject, when he referred to his own situation, 
became as dramatic as anything in the third act of " Kichard 
the Second." " I certainly," he said, " did not come into office 
by my own desire. Had I my wish, I would have quitted it 
a hundred times; but as to my resigning now, look at the 
transactions of this day, and say whether it is possible for a 
man with a grain of spirit, with a grain of sense, to think of 
withdrawing from the service of his king and his country at 
such a moment. Unhappy that I am, that moment finds me 
in this situation ; and there are but two ways in which I can 
now cease to be minister — by the will of my sovereign, which 
I shall be ready to obey ; or by the pleasure of the gentlemen 
now at our doors, when they shall be able to do a little more 
than they have done this day." But it was not fear of life or 
limb that called forth the tears which were running fast down 
the cheeks of one whose ordinary habit it was to trifle when 
brave men w^ere anxious, and to laugh when wise men were 
grave. North, in that bitter hour, would have cheerfully ac- 
cepted the fate of De Witt if he could have met death with 
the consciousness that he had preserved the self-respect of an 
English statesman. The least penetrating observer among all 
who sat upon those crowded benches was at no loss to inter- 
pret the passions which stirred and distracted that torpid and 



344 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

cynical nature. It moved the pity of open and honest foes to 
watch the hapless minister, as by gesture, voice, and manner 
he confessed himself the scapegoat of a policy which he de- 
tested and disapproved ; the slave of those who were in name 
his own servants, but who looked to another for directions and 
for rewards, and who, tired of maintaining the appearance of 
subordination, had thrown off the mask and assumed without 
disguise the airs of successful mutineers. At length he knew 
what he had done when he subjected himself, as Chatham 
truly said, to the insolence of a vile cabal who had made him 
the scourge of the country and now insulted his shame and 
distress. " Sir Gilbert Elliot," wrote Chatham's most regular 
correspondent in the Commons, " scarce restrains an absolute 
avowal of his power;" and even if Elliot, or others of his 
troop, had been touched by a feeling of compassion for their 
humbled chief, it was tlien too late to give effect to their re- 
pentance. The king's friends could not allow themselves to 
be softened by tears which the king was not there to see. The 
draught had to be swallowed to the dregs ; and the prime- 
minister, feeling and looking rather like a culprit than an ac- 
cuser, commissioned one of his more hardened colleagues to 
make the announcement which could no longer be averted. 
"VVelbore Ellis, who never minded what came into a day's work 
so long as it did not endanger the day's wages, rose to say 
that the crime of the lord mayor was undoubtedly heinous 
beyond that which had been so severely visited on the person 
of Oliver ; but that, in consideration of his broken health, and 
to show the tender mercy of the House, the cabinet were of 
opinion that he might be spared the Tower and committed 
to the gentler custody of the sergeant-at-arms. Crosby, how- 
ever, would have none of their indulgence, and scornfully de- 
clared that he was quite well enough to share the lodgings of 
his brother-alderman ; so that the government had no choice 
but to order him to the Tower, whither, but for his active and 
loyal assistance, they most assuredly never could have got 
him. Announcing that he had obtained leave to sleep one 
more night in his own bed, he returned to the Mansion 
House, and left it again at four in the morning for his pris- 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 3-15 

on ; but even this stratagem hardly saved the de2:)nty sergeant 
from the vengeance of the mob, who would have hanged him 
on a sign-post as high as Porteous if it had not been for the 
vigorous interposition of his captive. 

By the time that it was a week old, Chatham's forecast had 
come true to the letter. " These wretches called ministers," 
he wrote on the twenty-first of March, " will be sick enough 
of their folly (not forgetting iniquity) before the whole busi- 
ness is over. They have brought themselves and their master 
where ordinary inability never arrives, and nothing but first- 
rate geniuses in incapacity can reach ; a situation wherein 
there is nothing they can do which is not a fault." And so, 
as they had reached the point where one additional fault 
might be fatal to the realm, it only remained for them to do 
nothing. Wilkes had been directed to attend at the bar of the 
Commons on Monda}^, the eighth of April ; but by adjourning 
till Tuesday, the ninth, the House judiciously contrived to 
evade its own order. The prosecutions against the printers 
were dropped ; and when, in contempt of a resolution which 
had been solemnly entered on the journals of Parliament, 
Wlieble and his associates pursued the Speaker's messenger as 
a criminal for having attempted to enforce the Speaker's war- 
rant, the government, without looking too closely into the le- 
gality of the step to which they found themselves driven, 
made shift to hush up tlie business by means of a nolle ])ro- 
seqxii. Crosby and Oliver, indeed, remained in prison ; but 
they lived there in state, and certainlj^ in clover. The City 
kept them a table furnished according to civic ideas of what 
was necessary for men who required not only nourishment, 
but consolation. The Whig magnates, after a full and grave 
discussion, made up their minds to show them an attention 
which, as a compliment from peers to burgesses, meant a great 
deal more a hundred years ago than it does now. " We would 
not," wrote Lord Rockingham, "have a procession, but only a 
few, and those considerable ones;" and on the last day of 
March the joui-nals announced to an awe-struck jjublic that 
two dukes, a marquis, and an earl, with Burke and Dowdes- 
well as representative commoners, had waited on the lord 



346 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. VIII. 

mayor and Mr, Oliver in their apartments in the Tower. 
Their humbler admirers did what they could to evince their 
sympathy by marching twice in one week to Tower Hill, in 
order to behead Bute and hang the George Onslows in effigy.' 
Gold boxes and laudatory addresses from towns of every size 
and rank between Newcastle and Honiton showed that may- 
ors and aldermen, all the country over, made common cause 
with the illustrious martyrs of municipal independence. Par- 
liament was prorogued on the eighth of May ; and at the close 
of the session, by a self-acting process, all House of Commons 
prisoners regained their liberty. To avoid a popular demon- 
stration, the ministry purposely kept the day of prorogation 
secret ; but by the time that the Park guns began to fire and 
the Tower gates were opened, a cavalcade was already in wait- 
ing to conduct Crosby and Oliver to the Mansion House, 
more imposing by far than that which attended the king 
from the Palace to the House of Lords. The aldermen in 
their scarlet gowns, and the Artillery Company in full imi- 
form, escorted the lord mayor in his state-coach through roar- 
ing streets, which, as soon as night fell, honored the champi- 
ons of the city and the press with an illumination so general 
and spontaneous that the very apprentices of Paternoster Row 
had no excuse for breaking w^indows. 

While the instruments had their triumph, the master hand 
was not forgotten. The Court of Common Council voted 
Wilkes a silver cup, and left to himself the selection of the 
design. In commemoration of the date on which the publisher 
of the Middlesex Journal had been brought up to him for 
judgment, he chose the scene of the Ides of March in the 
Roman Senate-house, " as certainly one of the greatest sacri- 
fices to public liberty recorded in history." On that singular 
piece of plate appeared the dictator " in an attitude of fall- 



' "I had the honor, sir," said Colonel Onslow, addressing himself to 
the Speaker in February, 1774, " to be haugetl in effigy on Tower Hill on 
the same gibbet with yon. Indeed, in the dying-si5eeches, the patriots 
paid me the greater compliment ; for they gave out that I died penitent, 
but that you, sir, remained hardened to the last." 



1770-71.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 347 

ing," and Bratus congratulating Cicero on tlie recovery of 
freedom. Above were engraved the city arms, with a dagger 
in the first quarter ; wliile below, framed in myrtle and oak 
leaves, ran Churchiirs prayer that every tyrant might feel 

" The keen deep searcliings of a patriot's steel." 

The subject and the inscription were in the taste of a man 
who exaggerated the taste of his age ; but none the less was 
the power of Parliament to keep the country in the dark as 
dead as Julius Caesar. A twelvemonth afterwards the sher- 
iffs, in au address to the Livery, boasted with just pride that 
the House of Commons " tacitly acquiesced in the claim made 
by London citizens on behalf of the public at large, that the 
constituents had a right to be informed of the proceedings of 
their servants in Parliament." All pretence of, keeping the 
debates secret had by that time been dropped. "Your galler- 
ies," said Burke, on the budget-night of 1772, " are like to 
break down with the weight of strangers, as you are pleased 
to call the people of England." The door, once forced, was 
never locked again ; and if from time to time there was talk 
of shutting it, it was thrust wide open by a hand strong 
enough, if need were, to have torn it from the hinges. When 
Colonel Luttrell, in January, 1778, stated his intention of 
moving that strangers should be excluded — on the w^ell-worn 
plea that he had been misrepresented in a newspaper — Fox, 
to whom seven years had taught some maxims of political 
wisdom even less obvious than that which he now rose to en- 
force, declared that in his view the only method of preventing 
misrepresentation was by giving more publicity than ever to 
the debates and decisions of the House, since the surest recipe 
for killing a lie was to multiply the witnesses to the truth. 
The reporters might well be at ease as to the future of their 
craft, when once they had taken down in black and white so 
sweeping and explicit a recantation from the mouth of the 
most formidable among their ancient enemies. 



348 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX, 



CHAPTER IX. 

1771-1772. 

Fox at this Period a Consistent Defender of the King's System. — The 
Case of New Shoreham. — The Grenville Act. — Quarrel between Fox 
and Wedderburn. — The Duke of Portland and Sir James Lowther. — 
The Nullum Tempus Bill. — Muemon. — Pertinacity of Sir James Low- 
ther. — Sir William Meredith introduces an Amending Bill, which is 
opjwsed, and at length defeated, by Fox. — Fox and Burke. — Fox 
sends a Challenge to an Unknown Adversary. — The Petition of the 
Clergy, and its Fate. — Story of Mr. Lindsey. — The Dissenters' Relief 
Bill. — Priestley and the Early Unitarians. — Courage and IndeiJcndence 
of Charles Fox. 

It must not be supposed that Charles Fox reserved all his 
combativeness for such far-sounding and liistorical contro- 
versies as those which the House of Commons maintained 
against the shire of Middlesex and the city of London. He 
loved the old political system under which his father had 
risen to greatness too frankly and loyally to place himself 
beneath its standard only ou the occasion of a battle royal or 
a full-dress parade. "Whenever there was a call to arms in 
the most remote outwork of that stronghold of abuses behind 
whose protection the country was with impunity misgoverned, 
Fox appeared at the threatened spot with all his artillery, al- 
most as soon as the assailants had opened their trenches. His 
prowess in the cause was a theme for constant discourse and 
admiration among the rank and file of the ministerial party ; 
but ]ie never more than half pleased the managers. JN^orth 
and Thurlow and the Bedfords had quite wit enough to per- 
ceive that his devotion to the very peculiar institutions which 
Lord Holland had taught him to revere arose from the gener- 
ous conservatism of youth, and not from the sordid anticipa- 
tions of self-interest. They foresaw that an enthusiasm like 
his, when once it had detected itself to be misplaced, would 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES POX. 349 

not be long before it was converted into bitter and most ef- 
fectual hostility ; and they looked forM-ard uneasily to the 
day when his energy and intrepidity might be directed from 
the outside against those weak points in their circle of de- 
fence whither, with a promptitude which showed his all too 
accurate knowledge of the ground, he now flew to post him- 
self on the first alarm of danger. 

That alarm never rang more clearly to a discerning ear 
than when the first committee which had ever been appoint- 
ed under George Grenville's Act for securing the purity of 
the constituencies brought in its first report. In the Novem- 
ber of 1770, there was an election in the borough of New 
Shoreham, in consequence of the death of a sitting member. 
The country gentlemen of Sussex, who knew what sort of a 
place ISTew Shoreham was, kept aloof from the contest, which 
la}^ between two candidates, of whom one, in the phrase of 
the day, was a Nabob, and the other a Caribbee. Mr, Pur- 
ling, the West Indian, got only thirty-seven votes, as against 
eighty-seven which were secured by his opponent, Mr. Kum- 
bold. The bribery oath was administered to Mr. Rumbold's 
supporters and freely taken ; but it was noticed that the re- 
turning-ofticer, Hugh Roberts by name, put to each of them 
certain queries offensive to the dignity of a British citizen ; 
and the surprise which his conduct throughout the day pro- 
voked deepened into positive stupefaction when, at the close 
of the poll, he declared Mr. Purling duly elected. When 
questioned by a committee of the House of Commons, Rob- 
erts stated that he was aware that Mr. Rumbold had a legal 
majority, but that he was aware also of the means by which 
the majority had been obtained. There was, he said, at 
Shoreham a company which, instituted with a view to the 
promotion of ship-building, the most important among the 
confessed industries of the town, had for some years past 
been reorganized on a less worldly basis. Towards the end 
of 1764, the association resolved to devote its efforts to works 
of charity, called itself the Christian Club, and swore all its 
members on the four Evangelists to be steadfast, true, and si- 
lent. Those members included the majority of the borough 



350 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

voters; and the society, whether in the commercial or the re- 
lio-ious phase of its existence, had, in point of fact, never 
been anything else than a trades-nnion for purposes of cor- 
ruption. On the principle that no man has a right to injure 
his neighbor by selling his conscience below the market-price, 
and that the skilful and the clumsy, the impudent and the 
bashful, ought to share and share alike in the wages fund of 
bribery, the club, on the eve of an election, made its bargain 
for the payment of a lump sum, W'hich was divided, after the 
contest was over, among men who were tlius enabled to swear 
at the polling-booth that they had never received a farthing 
for their votes. Those votes had been bought by Rumbold 
for five - and - thirty pounds apiece ; and Roberts, who had 
once been a Christian brother, and had left the fraternity, dis- 
gusted (according to his own story) at finding that his col- 
leagues were quite indifferent to the nationality of their mem- 
ber as long as they saw the color of liis money,' was in a po- 
sition to identify seventy-six of the majority as members of 
the club. "With these facts in his cognizance, he had made 
bold to take the law into his own hands, and save the expense 
of a petition by summarily altering a return which no election 
committee that ever was packed could for an instant hesitate 
to reverse. 

These disclosures produced a wholesome though transient 
effect upon the opinion and the tone of Parliament. Ten 
years of personal government and secret influence had not 
yet so impaired the character of English gentlemen but that 
they had still the grace to hate their own faults when dis- 
torted in a vulgar mirror. Burke, for once, had the House 
with him, as he moralized upon the spectacle of a depravity 
so hypocritical, and, above all, so sj^stematic. " I am shocked," 
he said, "at the wisdom to be found in these transactions. I 

^ '■'■LorclJohi Cavendish. — Do you remember a meeting of the club upon 
a false report of Sir Samuel Cornisli's death ? 

^'■Roberts. — Yes. They were debating upon the several gentlemen who 
were to represent the borough. They said they would vote for the mem- 
ber who would give most money. John Wood said, ' Yes, damn him, if 
he was a Frenchman.' " 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 351 

am shocked at the virtue — at the principles of honor and 
trust npon which tliese men acted : principles deserving a 
better cause. It is a wasp's nest — most curiously constructed, 
but still a wasp's nest — and as such it must be destroyed." 
A bill disfranchising the members of the Christian Club was 
introduced, and an address praying his Majesty to order a 
prosecution of the ring-leaders in the conspiracy was carried, 
with general, but not quite with universal, acceptance. What- 
ever others might do, Charles Fox was not to be fed with 
grandiloquent professions of virtue, and sermonized into the 
support of Pharisaical measures. lie was almost beside him- 
self with contempt and indignation at the blindness of men 
who could not or would not see that, in chastising electoral 
impurity, they were striking at one of the pair of pillars on 
which the roof rested that sheltered them all in common. 
The Christian Club was as essential a feature in the system 
which claimed their allegiance and provided them with their 
bread as the privy purse itself. The policy that found favor 
with the Court was one wdiich would not have lived through 
the first week in the first session of an unbought Parliament ; 
and bribed representatives would never be returned a second 
time by unbribed constituents. Fox knew the political situa- 
tion as exactly and thoroughly as any veteran in the cabinet ; 
and, where he was sure of his ground, he never feared to act 
alone. Faithful among the faithless to the doctrines on which 
his youth had been nourished, he stood, the Abdiel of cor- 
ruption, firm and square against this unexpected and impos- 
ing manifestation of public virtue. When the question of 
the Shoreham election was mooted. Fox had thrown a perfect 
deluge of cold water upon the proposal of an inquiry ; and, 
now that the story had come to the surface in all its ugliness, 
he breathed fire and fury against the advocates of a policy of 
severity. While his colleagues were crying with one voice 
for the exemplary punishment of a town in which there were 
not as many righteous burgesses as in Sodom,' he could see 
nothing but the injustice and inconsequence of visiting peo- 

' Cavendish, vol. ii. p. 310. 



352 THE EARLY HISTOKY OF [Chap. IX. 

pie with a penal disfrancliisement for doing once in seven 
years that which was done, on every quarter-day, by two out 
of five among the gentlemen who condemned them. He 
fought the measure with all the faculties which nature had 
given him, and with all the weapons which the usage of Par- 
liament, hardly less lavish than nature, had placed at his dis- 
posal. He would have divided against the first reading, if 
he could have induced a single member to assist hira as teller. 
Hampered, though not alarmed, by his isolation, he utilized 
the rare and brief moments which he' spent in his lodgings in 
Piccadilly to coax and tease Fitzpatrick into joining forces 
with him in opposition to the bill. The two kinsmen, by 
their combined exertions, succeeded in mustering for the de- 
fence of the Christian Club a small band whose strength grad- 
ually increased from six to fourteen, and from fourteen to 
eighteen. But time was against Fox ; and, before the num- 
ber of his contingent had turned the score, the bill had passed 
into a law which, in an uncontrolled burst of disappointment, 
he pronounced to be as ridiculous and wicked an ordinance 
as any that deformed the Statute-book. 

The proof which the fate of Shoreham afforded that the 
Grenville Act was an effectual engine for checking, and, in 
honest and willing hands, even for suppressing, bribery shar- 
pened the zeal of Charles Fox against a reform which he had 
never loved.' In the spring of 1770, when Grenville's scheme 

' The efficacy of Grenvine''s plan for trying disputed elections may be 
tested by the diflereut manner in which it was regarded by a Tory who 
loved, and a Tory who hated, corruption. Rigby openly said in Parlia- 
ment that he was against the act, because it stojjped treating ; and no- 
body objected to treating except, a candidate who wanted to save his 
money. Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, in his pamphlet entitled " The 
Patriot," approved the act, because it insured that the man who possessed 
the unbought confidence of the constituents should sit as their member. 
"A disputed election," he wrote, "is now tried with the same scrupulous- 
ness and solemnity as any other title. A candidate that has deserved 
well of his neighbors may now be certain of enjoying the effect of their 
approbation ; and the elector who has voted honestly for known merit 
may be certain that he has not voted in vain." " I never neglect business," 
said the political jobber in Foote's " Cozeners ;" " but the i^erpetuating 
this Briljcry Act has thrown such a rub in our way." 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 353 

first saw the light, the young politician had not j^et worked 
his way upwards to the doubtful privilege of being reported 
at full length ; and the " Parliamentary History" of that year 
contents itself with recordiug that Mr. Charles Fox did his 
part "-in a lively academical manner, stating and taking off" 
the arguments which were adduced in favor of the bill. But 
in the next session, when the law was seven months old, and 
its author dead, Fox had already attained to that middle stage 
of political notoriety when a man's graver and more work- 
manlike speeches are still liable to be abridged and mangled, 
but every syllable of folly and iuipertinence that he utters, or 
that is uttered about him, is sure of being immortalized. Tow- 
ards the end of November, during a conversation that was be- 
ing carried on across the House about a disputed election in 
the borough of Scarborough, Fox, while arguing against the 
new method of trying petitions, dropped something M-hich was 
capable of being construed as disrespectful to the memory of 
the statesman by whom that method had been invented. 
Wedderburn, who just then was eager to provide himself 
with a colorable pretext for the treason which he meditated 
by posing on all occasions as a personal follower of Grenville, 
emancipated from ties of party by his master's death, saw 
his opportunit}^, and, after gratifying the Whigs with a most 
eloquent panegyric on his own lost leader and their regretted 
ally, expressed his wonder that anybody could be so heartless 
as to cast aspersions on such a reputation. Fox, who had no 
notion of lending himself as a lay-figure to be exhibited in 
any attitude that suited Wedderburn's rhetorical purposes, 
was on his legs before the other was down. Stepping at once 
over the line which the House of Commons has always re- 
garded as the extreme verge of the permissible, lie charged 
the learned gentleman with having put words in his mouth 
which, to the learned gentleman's own knowledge, had never 
been spoken. Having launched his defiance, he was marching 
out amidst an uproar well-nigh loud enough to have awakened 
Grenville in his grave, when the Speaker bade him resume 
his seat, and ordered the sergeant-at-arms to lock the doors. 
Welbore Ellis, who Jiad the formulas applicable to all possi- 



354 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

ble parliamentaiy contingencies in liis liead, where there was 
plenty of room to keep them properly sorted and ticketed, 
rose on behalf of tlie House to require an assurance from both 
parties that the affair should not go further. Burke, pained 
by the aspect of a quarrel over a name which had always com- 
manded respect, and of late had inspired something not dis- 
tantly resembling affection, in one of tlie most feeling and 
graceful of those short speeches of the instant which are 
further beyond rivalry or imitation even than his precon- 
certed efforts, urged Fox and Wedderburn to reflect that con- 
sideration for the dead ought not to inflame, but to heal, the 
dissensions of the living. To shake hands upon the union of 
their hearts would, he reminded them, be a worthier tribute 
to the memory of Grenville than the show of reconciliation 
through which, whether they liked it or not, they would be 
forced to pass. But Wedderburn's cue w-as to play surly fidel- 
ity even at the risk of overdoing the part ; and tlie burden of 
submission therefore fell npon his opponent, whose heat was 
real, and who, in the opinion of almost every witness present, 
had been more sinned against than sinning. Fox begged par- 
don of the House for having used words which ought to have 
been left unsaid — an apology from the benefit of wliich he 
pointedly excepted Wedderburn ; and then, making the very 
unusual and uncongenial effort of dropping his voice till it 
became inaudible, he muttered something which was lost oven 
on the greedy ears around him. It was enough, however, for 
the Speaker, who wisely pretended to have caught tlie sound 
of the conventional sentence, which was understood to signify 
that the dispute would not be transferred to that rural soli- 
tude behind Bedford House where Whigs were in the habit 
of settling their differences.' 

It was not very long before Fox gave proof that he was 
ready to maintain his words with sword and pistol against 
anybody whom lie was allowed to fight. Plis next escapade 

'That was the spot where, just two mouths afterwards, Lord Milton 
was shot tlirougli the body by Lord Poulett, Lord John Cavendish act- 
ins: as one of the seconds. 



1771-71.'.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 355 

arose, as usual, out of his devotion to the royal theory of gov- 
ernment — a devotion which, most happily for himself and for 
his conntiy, was appreciated as little and requited as ill as it 
deserved. If, at an age when his character was still malleable, 
his premature ambition had been tempted by the offer of the 
highest place in the State, he might have gone down to the ex- 
ecration of posterity as the Wentworth of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. But strong measures were more to George the Third's 
taste than strong men ; and the result of the most determined 
step which the king took in the track of the Stuarts indicated 
unmistakably that he was leaning on the shoulder, not of a 
Strafford, but of a Grafton. 

The plan of Thorough on which the Court was bent might 
have succeeded but for an obstacle which had saved England 
from more than one such plot in earlier times, and which re- 
mained as a second line of defence against arbitrary power 
after the country had grown formidable enough to save itself. 
Unless the king could attract, or drive, a larger portion of the 
nobility into the ranks of his adherents, he could never hope 
to see his policy durably established. Protests disputing the 
principles on* which that policy was founded, and censuring 
the acts by which it was carried into effect, were signed, when 
Rockingham and Chatham had both had a hand in the com- 
position, by forty of the most respected and redoubted names 
on the roll of Peers. If a question affecting the Constitution 
was at stake in the House of Lords, the government, after 
they had done all that men could do, and promised more than 
ministers had to give, were obliged to be satisfied if, upon a 
division, they could just beat the Opposition by two to one ; 
and the influence of a great peer whose heart was with the 
people more than doubled that of one whose pocket induced 
him to be against them. Before the king could get his pur- 
poses fully and finally accomplished, his partisans would have 
some more serious work to do than the mere voting-down of 
his opponents at Westminster. A system under which the 
nation had been governed, and on the whole admirably gov- 
erned, during four reigns, of which all were prosperous and 
three glorious, could not be overset by marching a file of 



356 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

lords of the bedchamber and pensioners of the Civil List in 
and out of a glass door. As soon as it came to the essential 
push, all the rotten boroughs between the Keedles and the 
Lizard would not be w^orth a single great county with an 
Earl of Fitzwilliam or a Duke of Kichmond to marshal its 
army of freeholders. The spirit of the contumacious aristoc- 
racy must be broken, and a notable example made ; or every- 
thing that had been concocted by Bute and perpetrated b}^ 
Henry Fox would have been done in vain. It was in the 
summer of 1Y68 that Grafton consented to engage in a proj- 
ect of confiscation and proscription. But he commenced the 
undertaking rashly, and pursued it timidly. He blundered 
alike in the choice of tlie accomplice who was to be gratified 
with the booty, and of the victim upon whom the work of 
spoliation was to begin. 

The Duke of Portland, though he had nothing aggressive 
or quarrelsome in his nature, was as dangerous a man to at- 
tack as any in the kingdom. So amiable that he had no as- 
sociate who was not an attached and devoted friend — and 
proud with the pride which leads its possessor habitually to 
shrink from putting himself in the wrong, or from venturing 
to take a liberty wath others — he was framed to go through 
life after such a fashion that, unless by some improbable 
chance he became the butt of calumny or the object of perse- 
cution, the world was never likely to discover for itself the 
high rate at which it valued him. How much, on the other 
hand, it valued Sir James Lowther, the w^orld knew very well, 
and has made no effort to conceal. His countrymen hated 
him so heartily and with so much cause that even if the 
worst half of the tales which they related and printed about 
him are to be accounted as mythical, enough remain, authentic 
and undisputed, to prove that in boorishness, caprice, insolence, 
rapacity, lawlessness, and, above all, in the practice of cruelty 
for cruelty's sake, he was three centuries behind the least esti- 
mable of his own generation.' When a man passes his life in 

■ An admirable full-lerigtli portrait of the Earl of Lonsdale, as he s\p- 
pears in history to a high-minded man of his own rank, may be seen in 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 357 

evil-doing, lie and his contemporaries cau seldom put their 
finger on the particular ill -deed which in after-times will 
stand in judgment against him. Sir James Lowther little 
knew, and, if he had know^n, would as little have cared, that 
more than fifty years after his death — when the groans of the 
inferiors whom he oppressed, and the murmurs of the equals 
whom he affronted, had long died away — an extraordinary 
chance would bring to light a story which has settled his 
character, once and forever, in the opinion of all who have a 
spark of feeling or manliness in their disposition. The mental 
tortures and humiliations which, as Earl of Lonsdale, he made 
it his pastime to inflict upon a dependent broken in health, 
advanced in years, and rendered defenceless by foibles which 
had been viewed with indulgence by men whose shoe the 
graceless peer was not worthy to buckle, are told by Boswell 
in letters rescued, in quite recent days, from the oblivion which 
will befall no production of his ]3en that has once passed 
through the hands of the printer. The faithless and brutal 
patron could not even plead that he had a right to despise the 
client whom he was deluding and tormenting; for, before 
Lord Lonsdale began to find his pleasure in feeding Boswell 
with false hopes, and harassing him with real insults and in- 
juries, the first instalment had already been published of the 
book which will be read by millions after Lowther Castle has 
shared the lot of Raglan and of Kenilworth. 

Wordsworth, in a fine sonnet addressed to that " majestic 
pile," speaks of it as founded upon 

" Charters won and guarded by the sword 
Of ancient honor." • 

That the compliment to the building should be a deserved 

Lord Albemarle's " Memoirs of Rockingham," in the third chapter of the 
second volume. 

* The family of the poet were among the innumerable creditors whom 
Lord Lonsdale ruined, or half ruined, by withholding from them their 
due, and defying them to recover it at law from a litigant as wealthy as 
he was unscrupulous. The young Wordsworths, left fatherless and al- 
most penniless, "fought life's battle as well as they could for several 
years," until the second earl repaired the injustice of his predecessor. 



358 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

one was certainly not the desire or the intention of its most 
noted occupant. Never, since the Star-chamber ceased its 
sittings, has there occurred a ruder and m.ore dangerous vio- 
lation of the safeguards which protect the existence of private 
property than was attempted by Grafton and his colleagues at 
the instance and for the profit of Sir James Lowther. Not 
content with a fortune which, in Walpole's words, would have 
enabled him to hire the Dukes of Marlborough and Bedford 
as led captains — not content with a local ascendency that 
placed at his beck and nod the suffrages of a region in which 
(as he loved to hear from his flatterers) he was absolute mas- 
ter of the land, the water, and the fire' — he was ever on the 
watch for an opportunity to rob his neighbor of territorial 
possessions and political influence. In Cockermouth and Ap- 
pleby and Whitehaven, his presence w\as terror and his orders 
were law ; but in the county of Cumberland and the city of 
Carlisle his dictation was resisted, and successfully resisted, 
by a population emboldened by the countenance of a poten- 
tate as formidable as himself. The leadership of the House 
of Bentinck was acknowledged far and wide through the 
Northwest of England, where large tracts of Crown property 
had been made over to its founder by William the Third as a 
recompense for the services and the affection of a lifetime. 
The title of the Portlands to the lands and royalties and 
manors which they assumed as a consequence of these grants 
had for seventy years never been mistrusted by themselves or 
contested by others. Among the acquisitions which the fam- 
ily owed to roj'al gratitude and munificence was the Forest 
of Inglewood, a district rich in natural products, and, what 
was more to the purpose on the eve of a general election. 



' " E'en by the elements his iDOwer confessed, 

Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possessed ; 

And one sad servitude alike denotes 

The slave that labors and the slave that votes." 

Bosciad, Part ii., No. 5. 

" We all know," wrote Boswell, " what he can do ; he njDon whom the 
thousands of Whitehaven deiJcnd for three of the elements." 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 359 

swarming with small freeholders. The duke, at the period 
of his marriage, had included in his wife's settlements his in- 
terest in the forest— an interest which, in the eyes of the em- 
inent conveyancers whom he employed, belonged to him and 
his, as Dunster Castle belonged to the Luttrells, or St. Mi- 
chael's Mount to the St. Aubyns. It is not therefore difficult 
to imagine the consternation with -which, in September, 1TG7, 
he was informed that, in the previous July, Sir James Low- 
ther had presented a memorial to the Lords of the Treasury, 
stating that the Forest of Inglewood and the soccage of the 
Castle of Carlisle liad been long withheld from the Crown 
without the Crown's receiving from them any benefit, and 
praying a lease of them for his own life and two others on 
such terms as should appear fitting to their lordships. 

The duke had reason to be nneasy ; for the petition, on the 
face of it, was such as never would have been presented ex- 
cept in a case where the petitioner had assured his ground 
beforehand. Son-in-law to Bute, and in Parliament the ser- 
geant of a whole squad of members who wheeled to right or 
left at his bidding, Lowther found little difficulty either with 
the Crown or the Treasnry. The peer was trifled with, blind- 
ed, thwarted at every turn, and left out in the dark and the 
cold ; while the baronet was kept promptly and minutely in- 
formed of the silent and rapid progress which the business 
made nnder the fostering care of officials who regarded his 
interests as their own. Eelying on a promise that no deci- 
sion should be taken until both sides had been fully and fairly 
heard, the duke's lawyers were still preparing his title — and 
the duke's agent, in pnrsuit of leave to inspect the records, 
was still travelling on a fool's errand from the Treasury to 
the Crown-office, and from the Crown-office back to the Treas- 
ury — when a letter from Whitehall arrived at Welbeck Ab- 
bey, informing the owner of the manor of Inglewood that his 
property had been granted to Sir James Lowther in consider- 
ation of a quit -rent of thirteen and fourpence per annum. 
The misfortune was heavy, and galling out of proportion to 
its weight; but, as far as sympathy could lighten it, the suf- 
ferer had no reason to complain. There was a cry of shame 



3G0 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

througliout the kingdom. The inhabitants of tlie ceded dis- 
tricts, who had been accustomed thankfully to contrast their 
own lot with that of their luckless neighbors, foresaw the 
treatment which a landlord who had stunted and impover- 
ished boroughs that were the ancient appanages of his house, 
for the sake of retaining his political predominance unques- 
tioned and undiminished, might be expected to deal out to 
those whom he and his electioneering agents w^ould regard as 
a population of subjugated aliens. Their dismay was shared 
by people who could make their apprehension and resentment 
felt much more effectively than a community of turf-diggers 
and small graziers whose hard lives were led two hundred 
miles away from the door of the Crown-office. The most pow- 
erful noblemen in England, and still more in Ireland, were 
conscious that those vast estates which in any European coun- 
try but their own would have made them princes could not 
fail to melt away like water if the obsolete doctrine of " ISTul- 
lum tempus occurrit regi" (in conformity with which the 
Duke of Portland had been evicted) w^as furbished up and 
re-established as the law of the land. And if they had been 
insensible to their danger, there was one awake and stirring 
who would not have allowed them to sleej). Writing under 
the signature of " Mnemon," Junius fell tooth and nail on the 
obnoxious maxim. lie translated it, with characteristic am- 
plification of phrase, into a shape in which it looked even 
more alarming than in Latin ;' he proclaimed, in all the maj- 
esty of capital letters, that its revival had given a shock to the 
whole landed property of England ; and he showed with un- 
answerable logic that, when once its authority was recognized 
in the courts of justice, no ministry, however enlightened and 
patriotic, could restrain the Crown from existing in a state of 
'•unremitting and immortal litigation" with those of its sub- 
jects who were worth the robbing.'' 

' " The maxim of ' Nullum tempus occurrit regi,' ' that no length of 
continuance, or good faith of possession, is available agaiust a claim of 
the Crown,' has long been the ojiprobrium of prerogative and the dis- 
grace of our law." 

" Muemon's letter of the fourth of March, 1768, replete with matter, 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 361 

The ministers set tlieir staff of scribes to answer Mnenion ; 
but they had better liavc left it alone. On a question that 
touched both law and administration, the Fleet parsons, who 
wrote for the newspapers under the orders of Sandwich, in 
the hope that he might think of them the next time that a 
small Crown living went a-begging round tlie cabinet, had 
no chance against a publicist decpl_y and carefully read in 
jurisprudence, and trained by a varied course of service, at 
home and abroad, in four leading departments of the State. 
The most promising idea which Grub Street could muster 
was to ring the changes upon the origin of the Duke of Port- 
land's wealth, and urge the Commons of England to imitate 
the spirit which their predecessors of 1695 displayed in re- 
proving and moderating the prodigality with which a Dutch 
king rewarded his imported favorites. This invitation to 
trace to its source the stream of fortune which had enriched 
a noble family was anything but attractive in the eyes of 
peers and great squires whose ancestors and ancestresses had 
acquired land and goods by the pillage of the Church and the 
poor; by the attainder of unhappy patriots who had fought 
on what was now regarded as the right side in some historical 
quarrel ; or by personal services, not so reputable as those of 
Bentinck, rendered only too freely to monarchs of merrier, if 
less glorious, memory than the stern Deliverer. Even polit- 
ical rancor was driven to confess that there were subjects too 
sacred for a parliamentary inquiry ; and Sir George Savile had 
the secret or expressed good wishes of both parties with him 
when, in February, 17G8, he rose to introduce a bill which 
provided that the uninterrupted enjo^^ment for sixty years 
of an estate derived from the Crown should bar the Crown 
from reclaiming its gift under pretence of any flaw in the 
grant, or other defect of title. By desperate exertions the 
government contrived to postpone the question till the gen- 



cleiir in statement, and devoid of exaggeration, has the precise qualities 
in whicli Junius, who took the field ten months later, was defective from 
the first ; and the gradual but total disappearance of wliich eventually 
destroyed his style and his influence. 



3G2 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

ei'al election liad made Sir James Lowtlier member for Cum- 
berland. But the debate showed that the feelino; was with 
Savile, and he so nearly succeeded in secm-ing the numbers 
that he was only beaten by twenty in a full House. Portland 
thenceforward awaited the issue with a confidence which 
proved to be well-grounded ; for the new Parliament, in its 
lirst working session, unseated Lowther for the county, and 
placed Savile's measure among the statutes, by majorities 
which the ministry had not the cash to bribe or the courage 
to intimidate.^ 

But the House of Commons and the freeholders of Cum- 
berland had not yet heard the last of Sir James Lowther. 
Savile had drawn his bill with a view to supplement and 
amend a law of James the First, popularly known as the 
Quieting Act, which had been passed to protect the holders 
of property from the machinations of professional informers 
who lived by hunting np flaws in Crown grants of old stand- 
ing, and then using their influence at Court to dispossess and 
supplant the rightful owner. I^nmerous enough formerly to 
have a name to themselves, these gentry were known to our 
ancestors, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, by 
the appellation of "concealers,"'' and Avere hated as the mo- 
nopolists were hated in the reign of Elizabeth, and as the mon- 
ey-lender is now hated by the peasant of British India.^ The 
most odious, and for a time the most thriving, of his class was 
Sir Giles Mompesson, against whom the first Quieting Act 
liad been expressly devised, and who stood to Massinger for 



' Savile's Nullum Teuipus Bill was carried by 205 to 124, and the Cum- 
berland election was overset by 247 to 95. 

= Sir Edward Coke, who was charged with the conduct of tlie Quieting 
Bill in the Parliament of 1620, remarked that a concealer " was ever a 
beggar before he died." Five sorts of men, he said, in his observation, 
never prospered — alchemists, monopolists, depopulators, concealers, and 
promoters. Tlie extent of the change which has been wrought in the 
constitution of society between those days and ours is strikingly illus- 
trated by the reflection that four among these five classes have disap- 
peared, and of the fifth nothing remains l)ut a name whicli now has come 
to designate another branch of industry. 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 363 

as powerfully over-painted a villaiu as ever ranted across the 
Enfflisli stage. Aniono; those who lived to shudder at Ed- 
inund Keau in the most harrowing of his parts, there must 
have been some who remembered that, in their own younger 
days, they too had known a Sir Giles Overreach whose deeds 
emulated those of the knight in the play, though he made 
less noise about them. The hero of the second Quieting Bill 
seemed to sleep on thorns until he had appropriated to him- 
self the character of one who 

" Frights meu out of their estates, 
And breaks through hxw-nets, made to curb ill meu, 
As they Avere cobwebs." 

A clause in Savile/s Act had provided that the grantees of the 
Crown should have a twelvemonth within which to prosecute 
their claims. The motive with wdiicli this proviso had been 
inserted was variously interpreted ; but no one even affected 
to believe that Parliament deliberately intended a measure, 
specially framed for the protection of an individual land-owner 
and a particular district, to be so construed as to subject that 
very land-owner and that very district to the annoyance and 
expense of an appeal to the chances of the law. Sir James 
Lowther, however, did not concern himself with the inten- 
tions of Parliament. Making diligent use of what he regard- 
ed as his year of grace, he carried his dispute with the Duke 
of Portland into the Court of Exchequer, and, on one and the 
same day, served writs of ejectment upon four hundred free- 
holders of the Forest of Inglewood. There was confusion 
and anxiety in all corners of Cumberland, where every family 
owned some member or connection whom a stroke as unex- 
pected as an earthquake had rendered liable to pass the rest 
of his days in a series of lawsuits, the first six months of which 
would more than beggar him. Fifteen bills in equity, and 
two hundred and twenty-five actions at common -law, were 
simultaneously in course of prosecution against men whose 
ideas of litigation had hitherto never risen above a contro- 
versy with the parson about the tenth sack of peat, or a wran- 
gle with a brother-commoner over the parentage of a gosling. 



36i THE EARLY HISTOKY OF [Chap. IX. 

On the eleventh of February, 1Y71, Sir William Meredith 
brought forward a bill for striking the clause under which 
these lamentable complications had arisen from the pages of 
Savile's Act. The act had found its warmest admirer in Ed- 
mund Burke, always, and in every succcessive phase of his 
political career, a sturdy champion of the rights of property.' 
He now adjured Parliament, as it valued its own consisten- 
cy, not to disappoint one section of the community by ex- 
cluding it from the operation of a healing law the benefits of 
which had been supposed to be universal. "The question 
is" (so he put the case), " whether or no you will restore the 
county of Cumberland to the same degree of peace, order, 
and security to which you have restored the rest of the king- 
dom." Yielding a point under pressure of disaj^probation too 
general and pronounced even for him to despise, Sir James 
Lowther commissioned his friends to inform the House that 
he should prosecute none of his suits except that against the 
Duke of Portland ; but by seeking to render his position less 
invidious, lie had made it more illogical than ever. It was 
understood that tlie Duke had been willing to bargain for the 
safety of his less wealthy neighbors by consenting that he 
himself should be left, in solitary peril, outside the shelter of 
the act. "I will sacrifice myself" (such was stated to be his 
language), " provided that my insecurity makes every other 

1 In 1780, (luring the most celebrated, if not the finest, speech that a 
member ever made to his constituents, Burke placed Savile's Act, for the 
limitation of the claims of the Crown upon landed estates, on a level in 
importance with his act for the relief of the Roman Catholics, and pro- 
nounced that those were the two measures which would carry to pos- 
terity the most respected name in the jiolitics of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. And as the member for Bristol thought then, so the member for 
Maltou thought to the last. Burke became a Tory, not because he loved 
arbitrary power, but because he feared it so much that he discerned signs 
of it (as Whigs believe) in a wrong quarter. " Burke," said Grattan, 
" could not sleep on his pillow unless he thought that the king had a 
right to take it from under him ;" but the epigram was spoken in an 
idle moment, to amuse and dazzle a young man whom its author did 
not credit with the fatal memory which was one of the most formidable 
sifts even of Samuel Reefers. 



1771-7-'.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 365 

man in England secure ;" but his friends were determined 
that, if their efforts could prevent it, he should not be allowed 
to suffer by his chivalrj. Sir William Meredith defied the 
government to produce a single argument for refusing to the 
one an immunity from litigation which was extended to the 
many, except that the one was rich, while the many were 
poor; and, Avith the fervor which a just cause never failed to 
arouse in him, he entreated his brother -members to reflect 
whither that argument would lead them. The principle of 
limitation, on which the Quieting Act was founded, seldom 
(he declared) affected the interests of the poor ; but it was of 
all legal doctrines the most essential for the security of the 
rich, unless they were to be rich no longer. It \vas the great 
man wliose influence made him formidable to the Crown ; it 
M'as the great man M'hose opulence made him a mark for the 
informer; and to deny the great, who needed it, a safeguard 
which was granted to the small, \vho could do without it, was 
to sanction a pregnant injustice under the specious cloak of 
popularity. Unless ministers could find some less dangerous 
ground on which to meet him, they had nothing for it but to 
suj)port his bill. 

It was never safe to challenge the Treasury bench for a 
reason, with regard to any question which filled a space in the 
mind of Charles Fox. Reasons, in that luxuriant soil, were 
plentiful as blackberries, and changed their color at least as 
often. Not when in after-days he was pleading in defence 
of the poor remnants of freedom which had survived the first 
fury of the anti-Jacobin reaction — not when he was deprecat- 
ing the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, or denouncing 
that elaborate net-work of repressive legislation which made 
it more dangerous for an Englishman to take a citizen's part 
in public affairs than to turn coiner or sheep-stealer — did he 
speak in a higher strain of feeling, or rest his cause upon 
more solid and time-honored considerations of natural equity 
and written law, than now when he was urging Parliament to 
except an individual, whose only crime was that he belonged 
to one political party instead of to another, from the protec- 
tion of a statute which protected every other property-holder 



3G6 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

in the country. The discussion, in its earlier phase, liad gone 
strongly against Lowther. His defence had been undertaken- 
by Sir AVilliam Bagot, a rustic orator, who first made himself 
ridiculous by invoking against Meredith's bill the powers of 
earth, of heaven, and of hell ; and who then blundered into 
an unpardonable breach of order in the shape of an appeal to 
the Speaker to assist the deliberations of the House by an ex- 
pression of his personal opinion. Burke and Dunning had 
made infinite fun of the advocate, and Savile had torn the 
case to shreds, when Fox came forward in the character of a 
plain man who had nothing new or valuable to say, but whose 
sense of right and wrong would not allow him to give that 
silent vote which, as a matter of fact, he was as little capable 
of giving as he was likely to let the box pass him at Almack's 
without trying a throw. Absolutel}' astonished (he said) by a 
proposal which in appearance was totally repugnant to every 
principle of law and liberty, he had waited patiently, anxious- 
ly, almost hopefully, in the expectation of hearing some satis- 
factory justification for a bill which had statesmen of repute 
and integrity among its patrons. There must (he had felt 
sure) have been something in it which he did not understand ; 
something which reconciled the measure with the acknowl- 
edged demands of justice. But when the debate ran its 
course, and the matter gradually emerged, from beneath a 
cloud of talk, in all its naked and genuine deformity, as he 
had at first been struck dumb with astonishment, so now he 
was impelled to speech by horror and indignation. "Who, 
sir," he cried, " that has a reverence for the law, a sense of lib- 
erty, or a regard for the Constitution can listen unmoved to 
a proposition which at one blow destroys our Constitution, our 
liberty, and our laws? It is under the law that every man 
holds his property ; and I firmly believe that no one in exist- 
ence has a better title to anything which he jDossesses than 
the title to Inglewood which the Crown has vested in Sir 
James Lowther. If that title is taken away by act of Parlia- 
ment, why not bring in an act to take away any other part of 
his estate ? "Why not the estate of any landlord in the king- 
dom ? If bills for the forcible transfer of property are thus 



1771-72.] CIIARLKS JAMES FOX. 367 

to pass, there can be nothing sacred, nothing secure among us. 
Were I a party to such a transaction, my conscience would 
never suffer me to be at rest ; and the same conscience which 
dictates my present opposition shall carry me on to oppose 
the bill in every step and through every stage. I wish that 
gentlemen who brought in the measure would, for their hon- 
or's sake, withdraw it. But if it succeeds here, it cannot suc- 
ceed elsewhere ; and I pray and trust that we may not suffer 
tlie scandal of this bill to lie at our doors, and surrender the 
credit of rejecting it to the other House of Parliament." ' 

St. Stephen's had never seen, and in all likelihood wuU nev- 
er see again, such perversity of opinion combined with such 
acuteness of intellect and intensity of conviction. The fame 
of the performance outside the House of Commons betrayed 
Horace Walpole, who was not given to overrate his juniors, 
into confessing that Charles Fox was " the phenomenon of 
the age." A young gentleman who owned so curious a con- 
science, and was in the habit of appealing to it with such 
transcendent effect, was worth even his weight in bank-bills 
and lottery-tickets to a cabinet which could buy everything 
except earnestness and sincerity. The immediate result of a 
speech which supplied the ministerialists with the most ex- 
alted motives for continuing a course which an hour before 
they had been heartily ashamed of having adopted was to 
diminish Meredith's majority by a half; and, a week after- 
wards, when the time came for the bill to be committed, Fox 
effectually redeemed his pledge of fighting every inch of 
ground against a measure which (as he cleverlj^ termed it) 
menaced the first principles of good government by confound- 
ing the legislative and judicial functions. From the moment 
that he took the affair in hand, all went well for Lowther. 

' Tliis speech, the first which Fox made on the subject, appears in the 
"Parliamentary History" in the debate of February the twenty-seventh; 
but it is the same as tliat which Cavendisli reports as having been deliver- 
ed on the twentieth. Cavendish, as always, is here clearly in the right; 
for, when the twenty-seventli of February came, and the motion that the 
Speaker should leave the chair was opposed by the friends of Lowther, 
Fox began by a distinct allusion to his own speech of the previous week. 



368 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Cii.u-. IX. 

By his audacious logic, and his inborn and hereditary skill in 
parliamentary management, Fox turned votes enough to de- 
feat tlie motion that the Speaker should leave the chair ; and 
there the matter would have ended but for the portentous 
discovery that a stranger had been counted in the division. 
The man, when brought to the bar, was recognized as a busy- 
body who haunted the lobby, and who had been rash enough 
to pursue his victims into a place where they had him at a 
disadvantage. Gathering courage from numbers, the members 
whose buttons he had held, and into whose pockets he had 
forced his documents, revenged themselves by disowning his 
acquaintance, and even by throwing suspicions on his identity. 
One suggested that he might be a consi^irator. Another, with 
refined malice, professed to believe that he was a reporter. 
A third went even further, and charged Sir William Bagot 
to observe what came of country gentlemen venturing to raise 
the devil. Burke, chafing under the sudden and, to those 
who had left Charles Fox out of their calculations, quite inex- 
plicable, reverse which had befallen his party, forgot himself 
for a moment, and, as his nature was, showed that he had for- 
gotten himself by becoming unreasonably and unseasonably 
solemn. "I do," he said, "in my soul suspect some malprac- 
tice in the coming-in of the man." This exaggeration of em- 
phasis, which belonged to the nationality of the speaker as 
much as ever did Shell's rhapsodies or O'Connell's boisterous- 
ness, called forth a smile on the countenance of Charles Fox, 
who was thereupon told that a gentleman capable of laugh- 
ing at such a sentiment would make a laugh out of anything. 
The challenge, given in a flash of excusable petulance, was 
not accepted. Fox already admired Burke to the utmost limits 
of his almost immeasurable deserts. lie treasured what he 
had been permitted to obtain of the great orator's confidence, 
and was ever ready to repay it with the whole of his own. 
"While still an aspirant for office, he had not scrupled freely 
to tell Burke his mind about the ministers from whom alone 
he could hope for preferment.' He had introduced him into 

' " Charles Fox called to see me," wrote Burke, in July, 1769. " He 
talks of the Bedfords in bis old strain of dislike." 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 369 

his family "with that air of triumphant complacency which a 
generous young man always throws into the business of bring- 
ing together the friend of whom he is proud and the relatives 
M'hom he loves ; and he had been not a little perturbed when 
Lord Holland treated the claims of his hero with the scepti- 
cism which the veterans of one generation are apt to entertain 
for the celebrities of another.' Burke gratefully acknowledged 
that, as long as Charles Fox was in the government, he him- 
self would never be without some one able and willing to 
oblige him with those services which the leaders of the party 
that was in were less ready then than now to do for a mem- 
ber of the party that M'as out." And on the present occasion, 
when Fox perceived that Burke was angry, he hastened to 
propitiate him with an explanation of a very different sort 
from that which he had lately thought good enough for Wed- 
derburn. The courteous pleasantry of his reply disarmed his 
adversary, and the dispute dropped — the last dispute which 
arose between men who were too great to be rivals until the 
day when, over a subject of contention that was no laughing 
matter, the friendship of five-and-twenty years was broken. 
A second division convinced the most incredulous among the 
"Whigs that they were honestly as well as thoroughly beaten ; 
and Fox, wdio had talked the House of Commons fairly round 
the compass, was entitled to plume himself upon a feat -which 
any one under a prime-minister may be proud to have ac- 
complished twice in the longest lifetime. 

But though Meredith lost his bill. Sir James Lowther did 
not gain his cause. When, after the ensuing long vacation, 



' Lord Holland remarked that lie supposed Burke was a wonderful 
man, but that he did not like those clever fellows who could not say a 
plain "yes" or "no" to any question you asked them. 

= " I hear," wrote Burke, in November, 1773, "that Charles Fox's speedy 
coming into the Treasury is expected. This event Avould not, I hope, 
prove sinister to a very just claim, and would prevent much oppression, 
to individuals, and, I am quite certain, a very considerable loss to the 
public." The claim was on the part of Burke's brother to some land 
which he had purchased in Grenada, the title to which was disputed by 
the Crown. 

24 



370 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

his case came on for trial, the lease under wliicli the Crown 
had granted him the Forest of Inglewood was found to be 
defective in an essential particular; and he was non-suited ac- 
cordingly. But from February to November — as long as the 
most popular nobleman in England was exposed without de- 
fence to all the evil consequences which might result to him 
from the greed of his rival and the spleen of his sovereign — 
public indignation was hot against the young politician who 
had stood between the Duke of Portland and safety. The 
great wn-iter who had constituted himself the censor of poli- 
tics had up to this period shown his gratitude towards his 
early patron, and added one more to the innumerable evi- 
dences of his personality, by the marked forbearance which 
he exhibited towards the favorite son of Lord Holland. Ju- 
nius, and the cohort of Romans and Greeks who w^ere Junius 
under many names, had contrived to fight Wilkes's battle w^ith- 
out lifting their spear against the most active of his enemies. 
An occasional hint that the Black Boy would do well to 
cleanse his ways, and look to his goings in his path, w-as the 
deepest scratch from that keen and ruthless weapon beneath 
which Fox had hitherto smarted. But soon after the Nullum 
Tempus Bill had been rejected. Lord North was addressed in 
the Puhlic Advertiser by a correspondent who signed himself 
" Ulysses ;" and who, while blaming the prime-minister almost 
beyond his due, showed no mercy whatever to his more guilty 
subordinate. " It was reserved," said the writer, " for Mr. 
Charles Fox, at the oj)ening of his life, to prove how easy 
and irreproachable it is, under your lordship's administration, 
to betray his first, his nearest, and his dearest friend ; to sac- 
rifice the interests and the honor of a young nobleman, the 
companion and confidant of his private hours, at the dishon- 
orable shrine of ministerial influence." The letter appeared 
on the fourtli of March ; and on the fifth, by two o'clock in 
the afternoon, which with him was equivalent to the first 
thing in the morning. Fox had already called at the office of 
the journal in the hope of seeing the editor. Having failed 
in his attempt to obtain a personal interview, he wrote to Mr. 
Woodfall, begging him, in firm but civil terms, to give up the 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 371 

name of his contributor, as Mr. Charles Fox was anxious to 
have some conversation with him on an interesting; subject. 
" If the author," so the invitation was w^orded, " either is, or 
professes to be, a gentleman, he can scarcely refuse me this 
request." But the much-enduring Ulysses was not to be 
drawn. He was well aware that, if once he stood on the 
grass beneath the sharp eyes of Richard Fitzpatrick, foot to 
foot with the lad whom his own father had taught his letters, 
the mystery of the epoch would be a mystery no longer. 
The secret which, a generation after it liad ceased to be dan- 
gerous, he carried into his grave safe from the curiosity of 
domestic affection, and the promptings of his own overween- 
ing vanity, would, at a crisis when disclosure was destruction, 
be known to at least three besides himself, of whom two were 
hostile ; and, unless the encounter proved bloodless, which be- 
tween such opponents was not to be thought of, the storj'' 
would within twenty -four hours be patent to the whole 
world. Ulysses would be identified with Mnemon, and Mne- 
mon with Junius. Ilis enormous influence over the minds 
of his countrj'men, of which he w'as silently but most justifi- 
ably proud, would vanish in a day. There would be an end 
to his hopes of a career in the House of Commons — hopes 
very precious to him, and, as the event showed, not presumpt- 
uous. His post in the department, where he was doing such 
well-paid work, would be vacant as soon as the secretary at 
war could get hold of a scrap of paper on which to write his 
dismissal. But the loss of the means of living would be a 
small matter to one at whose throat a score of swords would 
at once be pointed ; and when he had run the gantlet of 
Bedford's friends and Lowther's trenchermen, and the broth- 
er-sportsmen of Grafton, and the half-pay colonels who had 
been Granby's aides-de-camp — of the Guardsmen whose mil- 
itary privileges he had assailed with the effective accuracy of 
official knowledge, and the courtiers whose 'master he had 
lectured with irreverence which to them was nothing short of 
sacrilege — he had still before him the prospect, for years to 
come, of spending in the King's- Bench Prison every spare 
moment that he was not in the custody of the sergeant-at- 



372 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

arms. Philip Francis, as nine years later all Calcutta, and 
soon all London, knew, was not a whit less brave than he was 
quarrelsome; but Junius consistently refused to go into the 
field with antagonists who staked nothing but the chance of 
a wound against the certainty of his own utter ruin. Charles 
Fox, like Sir William Draper before him, was obliged to con- 
fess that he had not mastered the spell which could force that 
dreaded shadow to display itself in flesh and blood.' 

While Charles Fox was consistent in his fidelity to the 
theory of government which Bute had invented and North 
perfected, he was consistent in nothing else. The ministers 
could alwa^^s rely on him to defend any stretch of authority 
or abuse of patronage which the necessities of their singularly 
false position obliged them to commit ; but when a matter 
which had not yet been developed into an article of party 
faith was before the House, no man could predict anything 
with regard to him except that he was quite sure to speak. 
The prudent and the elderly, Whigs and Tories alike, foresaw 
with compassion the troubles that were in store for one who, 
on whichever side in politics he eventually settled himself, 
would have so very much to unsay. But, as Burke told an 
author who was reckoned a prodigy because she wrote well at 
a time of life when Fox was already a veteran among orators, 
" it is vain to preach economy to those who are come young 
to excessive and sudden opulence." " It is gratifying to ob- 

^ Junius refused to fight Sir William Draper on the ground that Sir 
William, having answered him in print, had agreed to abide by the or- 
deal of literary combat, and was not entitled to any jother form of satis- 
faction. Not having the same plea to urge in the case of Charles Fox, 
Ulysses was content to let his challenge lie unnoticed among the archives 
of the Public Advertiser. The story is told in the memoir of Sir Philii? 
Francis which was commenced by Mr. Joseph Parkes, and comijleted by 
an author who has written only too little and too unambitiously — the 
late Mr. Herman Merivale. That memoir has virtually set at rest the 
controversy that once promised to be eternal. Mr. Merivale, it may be 
observed, makes the slight error of printing the nom de plume affixed to 
the letters on the Nullum Temijus Bill as "Memnon," instead of "Mne- 
mon." 

* Burke to Fanny Burney; July 29, 1782. 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 373 

serve that the future champion of liberty and humanity gave 
frequent proof tliat the wealth with which nature had so lav- 
ishly endowed him was sterling coin. He was generally ready 
to make the most of every occasion on which the obligations 
of a partisan did not prevent his kindliness and his justice 
from having free play. When Sir AVilliam Meredith, antici- 
pating the labors of Romilly, protested against the barbarity 
and the inefficacy of a criminal code which attached the pen- 
alty of death to a hundred and fift}' sej)arate offences, and ex- 
ecuted that penalty upon only one criminal out of every sev- 
enty-five who were sentenced to it, his motion for an inquiry 
was seconded by Fox. And whenever the vexed question of 
religious tests was mooted in the Commons, the most ambi- 
tious aspirant for a high career who had opened his lips there 
since William Pitt thundered against the Spanish convention 
voluntarily incurred the bitter and lasting displeasure of the 
sovereign, whose favor was in those days indispensable to his 
hopes, by boldly and persistently asserting that respect for 
the rights of conscience was not incompatible with the duty 
of a servant of the Crown. 

In 1768, amidst the chaos of personal rivalry and public 
corruption which ensued upon the dissolution of Parliament, 
an accurate and most experienced observer had discovered 
symptoms that betokened the dawn of better things. " The 
general election," wrote Dr. Lardner, who, in the course of his 
eighty-four years, had watched intelligently at least twelve 
general elections, "has let us know the tempers of men, and 
assured us of a spirit of liberty reigning in the lower rank 
and also in many of middle rank." Nowhere did that spirit 
exhibit itself in such striking and varied aspects as among the 
members of the denomination which looked up to Lardner as 
its patriarch, and which counted Price and Priestley as hardly 
the most distinguished amidst its many ornaments. There 
was not another class of the community in which the average 
of intellect and attainments ranged so high as among those 
Presbyterians who during the last half -century had been 
drawing ever nearer to the tenets, and more willingly answer- 
ing to the name, of Unitarians. The ministers of that body 



374 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

were eminent in many departments of exact knowledge, and 
solidly but unpretentiously read in literature. They were 
masters of the clearest, and perhaps the most agreeable, Eng- 
lish that ever has been written — the English of the middle 
class in the generation before the French Revolution, which 
Johnson spoke always and wrote when he was old; which 
Arthur Young and Benjamin Franklin possessed in its per- 
fection; and which, after it had deservedly made his fame, 
William Cobbett at length carried into burlesque. The Pres- 
byterian leaders stood valiantly to the front whenever the 
general interests of Nonconformity were at stake. They ex- 
ercised always and in all places a freedom denied to them by 
statutes which the magistrate did not venture to enforce. 
Alone of sects they refused to be trammelled by a verbal 
creed. They thought as they chose; they preached as they 
thought; and the plenitude of their liberty aroused the ad- 
miring envy of many parish clergymen, and not a few actual 
and expectant dignitaries of the English Church, who, think- 
ing with them, were ill at ease within the rigid and narrow 
limits of the Establishment. 

The foremost of these men who felt themselves misplaced 
in a calling where their opinions, after every reasonable allow- 
ance and permissible reservation had been made, grievously 
belied the professions with which they had entered it, was 
Theophilus Lindsey, the Vicar of Catterick, in Yorkshire. The 
example and influence of Priestley, whose intimate friend he 
was, added point to the scruples which had long made this ex- 
cellent pastor restless and uncomfortable inside a fold which 
he loved too well to quit until he had tried his utmost to en- 
large its borders.' His efforts at one time seemed likelv to 
be crowned with success. In the July of 1771, a meeting was 

^ It was in 1769, at Archdeacon Blackburne's rectory, that Lintlsey 
first met Dr. Priestley, who was travelling in the company of Dr. Turner, 
a man of science and a layman. After the Y>iiYtj had broken u]), Mrs. 
Lindsey remarked on the playful talk and cheerful air of their new ac- 
quaintances, who bore their weight of knowledge and celebiity so light- 
ly. " Ah," returned her husband ; " your observation is just. But they 
arc at ease." 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 375 

held at the Feathers Tavern, attended by a score of clergy- 
men, and some doctors of pliysic and civil hiw.' Archdeacon 
Blaclvburne — whose arguments and expostulations, carefully 
framed to soothe the sensibilities of the most unworldly and 
disinterested among men, had with difhculty kept Lindsey 
from seceding at any moment during the past iive-and-twenty 
years — was intrusted with the charge of drawing up a peti- 
tion to the House of Commons, praying that clergymen of 
the Church and graduates of the universities might be re- 
lieved from the burden of subscribing to the Articles, and 
"restored to their undoubted rights as Protestants of inter- 
preting Scripture for themselves," without being tied to any 
human comment or explanation. Throughout the autumn 
there was an active canvass for signatures. Lindsey visited 
the country parsonages and cathedral closes that lay along 
two thousand miles of road in the South of England, with 
hopes that grew fainter as he became more widely acquainted 
with the mental attitude of his clerical brethren. When Parr 
held aloof, who tried to get prefierment in the Church of Ire- 
land for one Unitarian minister, and recommended a work 
written by another as a religious manual for his own lady 
friends — when Paley refused his name under the influence of 
a feeling wdiich he himself dubbed cowardice — Lindsey must 
have known how little was to be expected from less indepen- 
dent and enlightened men. It took six months of indefatiga- 
ble and ubiquitous work to collect two hundred and fifty 
names, includino; those of the lait}-. Lindsey expressed his 
disappointment and concern in measured and dignified terms; 
but other laborers in the cause were more outspoken, " I am 
verily persuaded," wrote a good man who had starved upon 
a cure of forty pounds a year because he could not bring him- 
self to purchase promotion by repeating his subscription to 
the Articles, " that if the Bible was burned to-morrow, and the 

' Tlie numbers present are very differently given by diiferent authori- 
ties. Priestley, Avriting to Lindsey three weeks after the event, says, "If 
I have been rightly informed, you were no more than twenty-four at the 
meeting, and you were in the chair, which I think more to your honor 
than being at the head of any convocation or general council." 



376 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

Alcoran introduced and established in its stead, we should 
still, provided the emoluments were the same, have plenty 
of bishops, priests, and deacons." To compensate him for his 
failure among those of his own cloth, Lindsey had reason to 
be j)voud of the quality, if not the number, of the politicians 
whom he converted to his views. The first impulse of a 
AVliig was to favor a proposal which would leave one test the 
fewer in a world where men whose only ambition was to go 
quietly about their business found themselves encountered 
at every turn by oaths, subscriptions, and affirmations. Sir 
George Savile and Lord John Cavendish promised to support, 
though they declined to present, the petition. A still heart- 
ier adhesion was given by Thomas Pitt, who, while a student 
at Cambridge, had been honored by his uncle Lord Chatham 
with a series of letters of advice and encouragement which 
young men who get their rules of life from books would do 
well to read as an antidote to Lord Chesterfield. The care 
and affection of the great statesman were not thrown away ; 
for his nephew's mind was early imbued with principles 
which were illustrated by his conduct and recommended by 
his manners throughout a career that began with an act of 
self-sacrifice rare in all ages, and next to superhuman in his 
own. To break an entail w^ith the object of paying a fathers 
debts was an inversion of the order of things amazing to all 
his contemporaries, and certainlj^ not least so to another rising 
senator who, if in little else, resembled him in his repugnance 
to the Thirty-nine Articles. " The other day " (wrote Lind- 
sey, quoting from one of his numerous and industrious cor- 
respondents), " Dr. Hunt went to wait upon Lord Upper Os- 
sory at his hunting -seat, where was Charles Fox and other 
lively bucks. The doctor opened upon the subject of our 
petition, and asked if they had heard of this intention of ad- 
dressing Parliament. ' Yes,' said Mr. Fox ; ' and, if conducted 
with temper and prudence, it may not be a bad scheme.' " 
The doctor, who wished to keep matters as they were, re- 
minded the young minister that, in a season of political ex- 
citement, whatever disturbed the Church must tend to em- 
barrass the government. " If I thought so," replied Fox, " I 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 377 

would oppose it. But perhaps, as there are no very consider- 
able persons concerned in it, it will drop of itself." 

A cause on behalf of which even Charles Fox did not con- 
trive to be more than lukewarm could hardly bo of a nature 
to arouse any very potent or wide-spread enthusiasm. Against 
the petitioners, on the other hand, was arrayed an overwhelm- 
ing combination of forces which seldom, indeed, have found 
themselves on the same side. Lindsej and his friends were 
met by the passive resistance of all the laziness and selfish- 
ness which existed in the Church of England at a period 
when her dearth of energy and devotion has passed into a 
commonplace of history ; and they had to prepare themselves 
for the active reprisals of a host of combatants, animated by 
an earnestness as intense as their discipline was effective. 
The zeal, the munificence, the spirit of organized and con- 
certed effort, which in later times destroyed slavery and the 
slave-trade, laid the foundation of popular education at home, 
and carried the Bible far and wide throughout the inhabited 
world, were now, in all the freshness of their early vigor, di- 
rected against a project that was nothing less than abhorrent 
in the eyes of Evangelicals both inside and outside the Church. 
They viewed that project in the light of a plausible device 
for herding together, on the common ground of a cold moral- 
ity, those rival denominations which kept religion alive by 
the stir and fervor of their conscientious differences. Lindsey 
must have been sorely disheartened by the answer that he 
got when he imparted the enterprise which he and Arch- 
deacon Blackburne had in hand to that Dissenter who, of all 
others, was the most likely to bid them godspeed. " If it be 
possible," wrote Priestley, " for us to act in concert with you, 
I wish you would tell us how. In the present state of Chris- 
tianity, I am for increasing the number of sects rather than 
diminishing them. Bnt I am only one individual. There 
may be Dissenters who are just as the archdeacon would have 
them." 

Such were the impressions of a jihilosopher whose temper- 
ament and opinions inclined him to a policy of compromise, 
and whose friendship for the author of that policy had led 



378 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

him liitlierto to strain a point in its favor. It may therefore 
easily be imagined how an offer so redolent of Erastianism 
was entertained by the old Nonconformist associations which 
had borne the brunt of the evil days that intervened between 
the Restoration and the Revolution ; and by that still more 
formidable body of men who were so intent on higher mat- 
ters that they had not yet found leisure to determine whether 
they were ISTonconformists, or whether they were not. The 
disciples of Wesley laid aside for a moment their standing 
quarrel with the controversialists upon whom the recently 
dropped mantle of Whitefield had fallen, in order to unite 
the Arminian and Calvinistic sections of the Methodist party 
in a joint declaration that, however filial might be their re- 
lations with the Church of England, if, like that of Ephesus, 
she returned to her first love, they would have no commun- 
ion, then or thereafter, with a church of Laodicea. But Lind- 
sey's most active opponent was not of his own rank or his 
own sex. "Wesley, who just then had upon him one of the 
hottest of his queer political fits, and seriously contemplated 
devoting himself to the confutation of Junius, was too much 
inclined to defend the ThirtjMiine Articles from behind the 
old Tory lines of Church and State, and left it for the famous 
lady who now was his one real rival in his own field to fight 
the battle on firmer and higher ground. The Countess of 
Huntingdon had little love for those latitudinarian opinions 
in which her husband died, and which in her son Avere fast 
becoming something more than latitudinarian by a process 
of mental reaction intelligible to those who have groped their 
way through that memoir of his exemplary mother which 
will remain to all time the worst edited of printed books.' 



' The younger Lord Huntingdon had some part in convincing tlie au- 
thor of the Broad-Church movement of 1771 that the English Establish- 
ment was not the place for a Crypto-Unitarian. " What became of the 
universe," he asked of Mr. Lindsey, "when its Creator hung lifeless on a 
tree in Judaea ?" " I am not concerned, my lord," said the other, " to an- 
swer that question; the foundation on which it rests not forming any 
part of my creed." " But the belief of it forms a part of the creed of 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 370 

And, over and above her family grievance, Ladv Huntingdon 
brought to the conflict a living faith which had nothing to 
match it among antagonists nine tenths of whom, as the issue 
proved, did not believe in their own cause to the point of 
suffering for it. Never wont to spare herself, she worked as 
she had never Avorked before. She banded together, in un- 
compromising hostility to the proposals of the Broad-Cliurch 
party, all professors of Methodism, from the aristocratic Lon- 
don circles to Avhicli she of right belonged down to the lium- 
blest group who gathered weekly round a lay class-leader in 
a remote Cornish village. She called in person on members 
of Parliament who were doubtful which way the}^ should 
vote, and indoctrinated those who were minded to speak on 
so unaccustomed a topic with ideas and phrases that were 
more familiar in Moorfields than at "Westminster. She sup- 
plied the prime -minister, who must have been not a little 
amused by her unselfish importunity, with arguments of the 
most exalted character in favor of taking a course wdiicli he 
already was engaged to take b}^ the single and simple motive 
for which he did everything — because the king wished it; 
and the king had pronounced against any tampering with 
the Articles, on the ground that " all wise nations have stuck 
scrupulously to their ancient customs." Lady Huntingdon's 
apprehensions were finally allayed by the assurances of a 
statesman whose springs of action w'ere more complex than 
those of North and his master. Burke conveyed to her by 
letter the promise of his strenuous aid in crushing what he 
stigmatized as "the conspiracy of Atheism;" audi in those 
days a measure which claimed to be a measure of reform 
stood but a poor chance when Burke had declared himself 
against it. 

The petition, which Sir William Meredith presented on the 
sixtii of February, 1TT2, was discussed in a manner w^orthy of 
the pains that had been taken to prime the speakers.' Those 

that Church in which you weekly officiate as a minister," was Lord 
Huntingdon's reply. 

' "In 1772 I published two short letters under the feigned name of A 



380 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

o-iants of old, whose skill bad been exercised in so many des- 
perate and dubious conflicts, now showed of what they were 
capable when party feeling did not tempt them to pervert or 
exao;gerate, and when the question which they treated had not 
been vulgarized by frequent handling. The problem of the 
obligations which may fairly and conveniently be imposed 
upon the ministers of a privileged church was stated and ex- 
amined with a clearness and conciseness the secret of which 
seems to have been lost by some of our generation who choose 
that problem for their special study ; with a frankness which 
makes us proud to think what courageous fellows our great- 
grandfathers were ; and a thoroughness as exhaustive as was 
attainable by an assembly of men who had not yet advanced 
to the point of asking themselves whether it was necessary to 
have a privileged church at all. As long as such an institution 
continued in existence, it was not an agreeable task to answer 
the objections called forth by the proposal that a declaration 
of belief in the Christian religion, as set forth in the Holy 
Scriptures, should be the one and only test imposed upon 
those who aspired to obtain a share in the wealth and digni- 
ties of the Establishment, and to teach with its authority. The 
stout old Tory who first took up the cudgels against Meredith 
asked what must be thought of ecclesiastics who, having 
scrambled through the thorns and briers for the sake of tlie 
grapes, were now intent upon destroying the hedges and leav- 
ing the vineyard naked and defenceless. " Would you," said 
another member, " pay a hired laborer his wages if, instead of 
doing a piece of work according to order, he adopted a plan 
of his own perfectly inconsistent with your ideas?" A third 
speaker went to the root of the matter by asserting bluntly 
that some of the clergymen who had petitioned to be relieved 
from any test but the Scriptures did not find in the Scriptures 



Christiaa Whig,' and put myself to the expense of giving a copy of the 
first to every member of the House the clay before the clerical petition 
was taken into their consideration." So writes Bishop Watson in that 
book of anecdotes which a reader who respects his character and agrees 
with his political opinions could wish were a thought less egotistical. 



1771-7l>.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 381 

that doctrine of the divinity of Clirist which was held by the 
vast majority of tlie people whose souls they tended and 
whose substance they tithed. Burke, by whom this idea was 
expanded into an oration, had seldom been finer, and never 
wiser. His exposition of the insufficiency of a declaration of 
belief in the Bible, in place of a more defined and detailed 
confession of faith, may be quoted as an example of the high- 
est performance of a man of letters who is likewise a man of 
the world.' lie would do much, he said, in order to remove a 
substantial grievance which could be remedied without inflict- 
ing a greater wa-ong upon a larger number. But what griev- 
ance had the petitioners to show ? And what would be the 
consequence of granting them the concession which they 
craved ? Their hardship amounted to this, that the nation 
w\as not taxed two shillings in the pound to pay them for 
teaching their own particular fancies as divine truths ; and 
that hardship, such as it was, could only be relieved at the 
expense of others whose interests and wishes had. a far more 
legitimate claim than theirs upon the consideration of Parlia- 
ment. Among a serious people, who looked upon religion as 

* " Tlie subscription to Scripture is tlie most astonishing idea I ever 
heard, and will amount to just nothing at all. Gentlemen so acute have 
not thought of answering the obvious question, what is that Scripture 
which they are content to subscribe. They do not think that a book be- 
comes of divine authority because it is bound in blue morocco and is print- 
ed by John Basket and his assigns. The Bible is a vast collection of dif- 
ferent treatises. A man who holds the divine authority of one may con- 
sider the other as merely human. What is his canon ? The Jewish ? St. 
Jerome's? That of the Thirty-nine Articles? Luther's? There are some 
who reject the Canticles; others six of the Epistles. The Book of Reve- 
lation has been a bone of contention among divines. Will those gentle- 
men exclude the Book of Esdras ? Will they include the Song of Songs ? 
As some narrow the canon, others have enlarged it by admitting St. 
Barnabas's Epistles and the Apostolic Constitutions, to say nothing of 
many other gospels. To ascertain Scripture you must have one Article 
more, in order to define what that Scripture is which you mean to teach. 
There are, I believe, very few who, when Scrij^ture is so ascertained, do 
not see the absolute necessity of knowing what general doctrine a man 
draws from it before he is authorized by the State to teach it as pure 
doctrine and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands." 



382 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

the most serious of concerns, there was a limit to the possibil- 
ities of ecclesiastical compromise ; and by making a new door 
into the Church for a handful of men wdio might find a n^iore 
suitable home elsewhere, at least ten times their number 
would be driven out of it. 

Savile replied in a noble discourse which, like Mr. Bright's 
speech on the Irish Church Bill, suggested to all who heard 
it that a statesman who lias his heart in the matter might beat 
the clergy on their own stage. " I cannot help saying," wrote 
John Lee, who, as one of the few lawyers then in the habit of 
frequenting sermons, was well qualified to judge, " that I 
never was so affected with, or so sensible of, the power of 
pious eloquence as while Sir George was speaking. It was 
not only an honor to him, but to his age and country." Sav- 
ile's liighest flight was inspired by the alluring, if chimerical, 
hope of a religious union with that multitude of his fellow- 
countrymen whose merits as citizens so devoted a Whig had 
the best of reasons gratefully to acknowledge. '• Some gen- 
tlemen," he said, "are apprehensive that if the Scriptures are 
substituted in the room of the Articles, it will be a means of 
admitting into the Church a great number of sectaries. Secta- 
ries, sir ! Had it not been for sectaries, this cause had been 
tried at Eome. Thank God, it is tried here ! Some gentlemen 
talk of raising barriers about the Church of God, and protect- 
ing his honor. They might talk as well of guarding Omnipo- 
tence, and raising barriers about the throne of heaven. Bar- 
riers about the Church of God! That Cliurch which, if 
there be any veracity in Scripture, shall continue forever, and 
against which the gates of hell shall not prevail! It is not 
we who should set bars in the way of those who are willing 
to enter and labor in the Church of God. Wlien the disciples 
came to Christ and complained that there were some wlio cast 
out devils in his name, what did our Saviour do ? Did he send 
them tests and Articles to be subscribed ? Did he ask them 
whether they M'ere Athanasians, or Arians, or Arminians? 
No. He delivered that admirable and comprehensive maxim, 
'He that is not against me is for me.' Go ye and say like- 
wise." 



1771-72.] CHAKLES JAMES FOX. 383 

Everybody who got a liCcaring* on that occasion spoke above 
liiniself except Charles Fox. During tlie four clays and nights 
that surrounded the debate he was only once in bed ; he must 
have drunk a dozen of wine ; and at one moment he had lost 
as many thousands of pounds. His knowledge of the subject 
under discussion was that of an Oxford undergraduate, clever 
enough to feel the absurdity of having been called upon to 
sign the Articles at his matriculation, and lazy enough to dis- 
like the prospect of learning them by heart, when the time 
came for him to go in for his degree. But, such as it was, Fox 
had no notion of keeping his experience to himself; so he 
washed his face (a process which there is reason to believe 
was too often the limit of his ablutions), and went down to 
Westminster to inform the House of Commons, with an air 
which would have been all very well in a college debating so- 
cietj", that ''religion was best understood when least talked 
of." At his worst, however, he had always his point to make ; 
and the smartest thing said that evening M'as his allusion to 
the inconsistent practice of the university, which deferred the 
oath of allegiance and supremacy till the age of sixteen, in or- 
der that the person who had to take it might be competent to 
determine whether he was a loyal subject or not ; while chil- 
dren of twelve were invited to attest the truth of a series of 
propositions relating to the most subtle doctrines and the 
most sublime mysteries that ever had bewildered the intellect 
and exalted the piety of mankind. His arguments, which did 
not even govern his own vote, sank but a very little way into 
the minds of an audience to whom Savile had brought de- 
light, but not conviction. Meredith had only seventy-one sup- 
porters ; whereas tlie members of Parliament who rejected the 
petition were at least as numerous as the clergy who had 
signed it. The question was raised again, after an interval of 
a year, with a somewhat more favorable result, due in part to 
an excellent speech from Charles Fox, who was anxious to ef. 
face the impression of a levity which he was already incapable 
of repeating.' In 1774 Sir William Meredith returned to the 

' lu 1773 the numbers were 71 to 217. In 1773 the minority, for which 



384 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

charge for the last time ; but his labored and tedious advocacy 
of a subject rather above his intellectual calibre, alienated 
hearers over whom he had lost his moral influence ever since, 
in an evil hour, he accepted the white wand of comptroller of 
the household. Burke, with a readier perception than usual 
of the tactics which the situation demanded, spared his broth- 
er-members a serious oration, and kept them for half an hour 
in a continual fit of laughter at the expense of the right hon- 
orable gentleman who lacked the wisdom of Moses, although 
he was now possessed of the rod of Aaron. The sense of the 
House was so evidently against Meredith that he did not vent- 
ure to divide. The cause was lost, and the beaten party has- 
tened to make terms with the conqueror. Promotion was 
dealt out in generous measure among the petitioning clergy- 
men who consented to abide in the Church of England; but 
honors so won were not honors in the eyes of Lindsey. Fore- 
seeing the fate of the venture on which his peace of mind was 
staked, he resigned his vicarage in November, 1773 ; aban- 
doned the modest luxury to whose charms he is reported to 
have been far from insensible ; sold a library which he iin- 
doubtedly loved ; and retired watli his wife and daughter to a 
ground-floor in Holborn, on a weekly income that was counted 
by shillings. His bishop confessed that the diocese had lost 
in him the most exemplary among its ministers ; and the con- 
gregation of Catterick heard his farewell sermon with a pas- 
sionate grief that was nothing less than a phenomenon at an 
epoch when parishes were accustomed to see their parson 
come and go with an indifference which was mutual. But he 
did not obtain nor expect the consolation wdiich is afforded by 
the praise of men. Solitary self-sacriflce, while it arouses the 
tacit resentment of all who feel themselves challenged to imi- 
tate it, is no protection against the censure of such as sincerely 
disapprove the opinions which have prompted the act. Lind- 
sey survived to see four of those who had put their hands to 
the petition and then turned back elevated in succession to 

Charles Fox was one of the tellers, remained at mucli the same figure, 
while the majority sank to 159. 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 385 

the episcopal beiicli;' but the only distinction which fell to 
liis own lot consisted in a few lines of grudging, and even sin- 
ister, commendation by a poet who so nobly celebrated the 
martyrs of faith that he might have had something better than 
irony to bestow upon the martja* of honesty.'* 

Lindsey would have felt less reason to despair if he could 
have persuaded himself that the House of Commons, in re- 
jecting his cherished scheme, had been actuated by religious 
bigotry. But the earlier parliaments of George the Third, 
whatever might be their faults, were conspicuously free from 
the narrowness and timidity which blighted the understand- 
ings and perverted the actions of our public men when once 
Robespierre and the Convention had frightened them into in- 
tolerance. Hardly any one who spoke either for or against 
the petition of the clergy sat down without having said some- 
thing civil to the Dissenters ; and Lord North went so far as 
to exclaim against the injustice of the regulation which still 
required ISTonconformist ministers and schoolmasters to sign 
the greater part of the Thirty-nine Articles. The State, he 
declared, had no right to impose conditions upon men who 
did not ask for emoluments. Encouraged by so plainly 

' Watson, who, if he did not actually sign the petition, at least spent 
ink and money in canvassing for it, was the ablest of the four. The most 
eager to recant was Porteus, afterwards Bishop of London, and such a 
light of Evangelicalism that Hannah More set his bust in her garden. 
Lindsey, taking mild revenge iu an anagram, conferred on him the nick- 
name of Doctor Proteus. 

" They now are deemed the flxithful, and are praised, 
Who, constant only in rejecting Thee, 
Deny thy Godhead with a martyr's zeal, 
And quit their office for their error's sake ; 
Blind, and in love with darkness ! Yet even these 
Worthy, compared with sycophants who kneel 
Thy name adoring, and then preach thee man." 

The lines occur towards the end of the " Winter's Walk at Noon." 
They contrast painfully with the passage in the " Morning's Walk " com- 
mencing " Patriots have toiled," which, iu the sweet expression of sym- 
pathy with heroic deeds and sufferings, yields to very little blank verse 
in or out of Shakespeare. 

25 



386 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

worded an invitation from so high a qnarter, the Unitarians 
lost no time in applying to Parliament to relieve them from 
a position wliicli was always precarious, and which might at 
any moment become intolerable. As honest men they could 
not pretend an assent to doctrines which they disbelieved ; as 
thoughtful men they objected on principle to binding con- 
science and reason in the rigid and awkward fetters of a 
printed confession of faith ; and their refusal to subscribe 
placed them outside the protection of the Toleration Act, and 
left their fortunes and their liberty dependent on the indul- 
gence of their rulers and the good-feeling of their fellow- 
citizens. Priestley could not give a lesson to his pupils or a 
sermon to his congregation without coming inside the tether 
of the savage laws which, between 1660 and 1672, filled the 
■jails and pillories with the brave and the innocent ; those 
laws which, as Chatham forcibly remarked, were coupled up 
like bloodhounds, to be let loose at the heels of the Dissenters 
if ever they made themselves troublesome to the government 
in the pulpit or at the polling-booth. At the best of times 
the famous philosopher and his coreligionists were at the 
mercy of any justice who had a mind to play the tyrant, or 
any neighbor who was ill-natured enough to lay an informa- 
tion ; and times could not always be at the best. The public 
opinion which kept in abeyance the Five Mile Act and the 
Conventicle Act was not immutable ; and if ever the tide 
of unpopularity ran against the Nonconformists, they would 
assuredly find that a law which was dormant had not ceased 
to be dangerous. Twenty years afterwards there would have 
been no lack of informers among the ruffians who burned 
their libraries and sacked their warehouses in the name of 
Church and King ; and the magistrates who cheered on the 
mob to plunder and arson would certainly not have refrained 
from imposing upon the objects of their dislike and suspicion 
those legal penalties which the Statute-book empowered them 
to enforce. 

The Nonconformist leaders were determined that, if they 
still were doomed to live on sufferance, at any rate they should 
not have themselves to blame ; and so pronipt was their action 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 387 

tliat ci bill for their relief was on the table of the House of 
Commons before the session of 1772 was past the middle of 
its course. They confidently relied upon the favorable dis- 
positions which the ministry had evinced towards them ; but 
they forgot that, behind the ministry, their sworn enemy (for, 
mindful of his coronation oath, George the Third insisted on 
so regarding himself) sat ensconced upon the throne which his 
ancestors owed to theirs. The king was disturbed and per- 
plexed by the appearance of a measure which the House of 
Commons liked and the country demanded ; but his astute- 
ness and his resolution did not fail him, and he soon devised 
a system of Fabian strategy which staved off the inevitable 
concession for seven livelong j^ears. There was no occasion 
(such was the tenor of the instructions which he laid down 
for Lord North's guidance) to endanger the seats of gentle- 
men who were returned on the Dissenting interest by oblig- 
ing them to go counter to the wishes of their constituents. 
They might safely be allowed to get from the question what 
credit they could against the approaching general election ; 
for the prime-minister (whose openly expressed concurrence 
with the views of the Nonconformists -his Majesty quietly 
ignored)' might count upon the bill being lost in the Peers. 
The king was as good as his word. The measure, after pass- 
ing the Lower House with flying colors, was quashed in the 
Upper House beneath the weight of overwhelming numbers ; 
and the official character of the majority was indicated by the 
fact that the bishops, who helped to vote down the Relief 
Bill in the Lords, exceeded, by more than two to one, the 
members who vainly opposed it in the Commons. 

But the question had a vitality which it required something 
more than the perfunctory antagonism of prelates and place- 
men to extinguish. It was raised afresh in the Lower House 
within the twelvemonth; and this time the king's friends re- 



' Mr. George Onslow had actually been in communication with the 
Presbyterian clergy on behalf of the Treasury; had begged them to 
grant him the honor of bringing in their bill; and liad assured them 
that they had the good wishes both of Lord North and Lord Mansfield. 



388 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. IX. 

solved not to abandon their first line of defence without a strug- 
gle. Their decision was fortified by a petition from a group of 
Dissenting ministers who, fearing Socinianism more than they 
loved religious liberty, entreated Parliament not to surrender 
a test imposed expressly for the maintenance of those essen- 
tial doctrines on which the Eeformation was founded. Lady 
Huntingdon, who thoroughly understood the distinction be- 
tween toleration and latitudinarianism, remonstrated earnestly 
with these misguided men ; but they went blindly to their 
fate, which was as terrible as any that oratory has within the 
resources of its armory to infiict. " Two bodies of men," 
said Burke, "approach our House, and prostrate themselves 
at our bar. ' We ask not honors,' say the one. ' We have 
no aspiring wishes; no views upon the purple. The mitre 
has no charms for us, nor aim we at the chief cathedral seats. 
Content to pass our days in an humble state, we pray, for the 
sake of him who is Lord of conscience, that we may not be 
treated as vagrants for acting agreeably to the dictates of in- 
ternal rectitude.' 'We, on the contrary,' say the Dissenters 
who petition against Dissenters, ' enjoy every species of indul- 
gence we can wish for ; and, as we are content, we pray that 
others who are not content may meet with no relief. We 
desire that you will not tolerate these men, because they will 
not go as far as we ; though we desire to be tolerated — we 
who will not go as far as you. Our prayer to this Honor- 
able House is that they be thrown into prison if ever they 
come within five miles of a corporate town, because they stop 
somewhat short of us in point of doctrine.' What," cried 
the indignant speaker, " shall we say to these reptiles except 
' Arrangez-vous, canaille !' " If any one would measure the 
extent of the transformation wrought in the British mind by 
its recoil from the excesses of the French Revolution, he has 
but to imagine the storm of fury and disgust that would have 
been raised in the Parliament of 1793 by a sentence which, 
a score of years before, was heard inside the same walls with 
a composure very nearly akin to approbation. Even in 1773, 
however, it was boldly spoken ; but there was something that 
evening still more boldly done. Charles Fox, who had made 



1771-72.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 389 

it Lis vocation to serve his way towards that official eminence 
which Bnrke could only hope to carry by storm, planted him- 
self at the door of the lobby as the responsible patron of a 
proposal every advocate of which was a marked man in the 
books of one who could close and open at will the road to 
place and power. How narrowly and attentively the king 
scanned the lists of those who told and voted for and against 
the measure which he detested was known a fortnight after- 
wards, when that measure once more met its annual death in 
the House of -Lords. Alone among his brethren, Green of 
Lincoln ventured to assert the principle that pious and learn- 
ed men ought not to be ruined and imprisoned for the crime 
of preaching to hearers who wonld reject any ministrations 
but theirs. "Green! Green!" exclaimed the king, when this 
instance of episcopal mutiny came to the royal ears ; " Green 
shall never be translated ;" and an act which betokened inde- 
pendence in a bishop, who could hardly hope or care to rise 
higher than the hill on which his cathedral stood, was nothing 
short of heroism in a junior lord, whose ambition was as un- 
bounded as his abilities. But could Charles Fox have fore- 
seen the career that lay before him, he would right willingly 
have incurred the very extremity of Court disfavor as the 
price at which he laid the foundation of the strongest and. 
most enduring sentiment that any section of the English com- 
munity has ever entertained towards any statesman — the grate- 
ful veneration with which the whole body of his ]^[onconform- 
ist fellow-citizens adored him living, and mourned him dead.* 

* A gentleman who sat as the first member for Manchester used to tell 
how the news of Fox's death affected his father, a leading merchant and 
citizen of that town, who had been forced to hide for his life from a mob, 
set on by men of his own class to punish him for his opposition to the 
American war ; who bacame a Nonconformist at the time when the Church 
had cast in her lot with the persecutors of civil and religious liberty in 
the early days of the French Revolution ; and who lived to treasure a 
Peterloo medal. The child, for he was but six years old, never forgot the 
scene : the untasted meal ; the unaccustomed tears ; the uplifted hands ; 
the exclamation that the cause for which so much had been sacrificed 
and suflfered had received an irreparable blow. 



390 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 



CHAPTER X. 
1772-1774. 

The IMoral Danger of the Position in which Fox now stood. — He at- 
tacks Lord North on tlie Church Nullum Tempus Bill, and resigns 
the Admiralty. — The Motives of his Conduct. — Marriages of the Dukes 
of Cumberland and Gloucester. — Anger of the King. — The Royal Mar- 
riage Bill. — The Bill gets through the Lords, is strenuously ojjposed 
in the Commons, and with difficulty passes into Law. — Strong Feeling 
of Fox on the Question.^His Earnest Efforts against the Measure. — 
His Sentiments with Regard to Women, and his Eager Care of their 
Rights and Interests in Parliament. — His Private Life. — The Betting- 
book at Brooks's. — Personal Tastes and Habits of Charles Fox. — His 
Extravagance and Indebtedness.— Horace Walpole on Fox. — Influence 
and Popularity of the Young Man in the House of Commons. — Fox 
goes to the Tl'easury. — Lord Clive. — Fox and Johnson. — John Home 
Tooke. — Fox leaves the Ministry, never to return. 

For the present, liowever, there was no love lost between 
the Dissenters and their champion of the future. Ten years 
of George tlie Third's policy had separated the nation into 
two deeply marked and intensely hostile factions, which in 
their composition, and even their titles, revived some of the 
most ominous associations in onr history, " The names of 
Whig and Tory," said a political writer in the year 1774, 
"have for some time been laid aside, and that of the Court 
party and Country party substituted in their room ;" and 
when English politics took the shape that they had worn un- 
der the Stuarts, there was no doubt on which side the Non- 
conformists would be banded. Those were days when it was 
not permitted to be friend and enemy by halves ; and an oc- 
casional vote or speech in favor of religious liberty did not 
make Independents and Presbyterians, who were Wilkites al- 
most to a man, forget that Charles Fox had been foremost in 
keeping the representative of Middlesex out of the House of 
Commons, and in preventing the people of England from 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 391 

learning what went on inside it. Here and there might be 
discovered an individual member of the middle or lower class- 
es acute enough to detect that the young jDolitician was made 
of different stuff from the jobbers who shared his bench and 
cheered his speeches.' But the mass of mankind judge their 
public men as they find them ; and Fox was almost univer- 
sally regarded as a bird of the same feather with the Bed- 
fords, if, indeed, the dice-box had not rendered that metaphor 
inapplicable to any of the clan. To the great majority of 
reasonable Englishmen he seemed as desperate in his fortunes 
as the worst of his colleagues ; as insolent in his defiance of 
sober political sense and legitimate popular aspirations; and 
superior to them in nothing except in those mental gifts which 
he had hitherto employed only to the detriment of the com- 
monwealth.'' And that which he seemed he was rapidly 

' lu a newspaper of the period there is a letter from a Quaker com- 
mencing -with the words " Friend Charles Fox, thou seemest to be pos- 
sessed of a very depraved kind of ambition," and urging him to put his 
talents to better purpose than " persecutions for telling the truth ;" a 
letter conceived in a tone of respectful and hopeful remonstrance which 
its author would never have wasted upon Weddcrburn. 

" The reputation for mischievous ability which Charles Fox had ac- 
quired almost in boyliood would be incredible if it did not stand record- 
ed in almost every page of the political literature of the day. There 
was no enemy of liberty so powerful and so highly placed that the lad's 
name was not coupled with his in the outbursts of public reprobation. 
One satirist, writing of the Barons of Runnymede, tells us that 

" Indignant from their hallow'd bed 
Each lifts a venerable head 

And casts a look of fire 
At Mansfield, chief among the band 
That deal injustice round the land, 

At either Fox, and at their sire." 

Anotlier testifies, in not ineflfective verse, how the young placeman si- 
lenced those among his elders who were his betters, and outdid in im- 
pudence those who were not. 

" Hear, hear him ! Peace, each hoary pate ! 
While ribaldry succeeds debate. 

Learn pun and wit from youth high-mettled." 



392 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

tending to become. George Herbert's proverb, " Keep not 
ill men company, lest you increase the number," would soon 
have met with its usual fulfilment had not Providence, kind- 
er to Charles Fox than himself, made use of his own unruly 
impulses to work for him an escape from a contagion which 
must erelong have incurably poisoned even such an intellect 
and such a nature as his. 

On the seventeenth of February, 1772, a member of Parlia- 
ment, whose family estates were confiscated abbey lands, the 
title-deeds of which had once been nearly sold for old parch- 
ment by a discharged servant, asked leave to introduce a bill 
for the purpose of securing the holders of what had formerly 
been Church property against dormant claims of more than 
sixty years' standing. Lord North, at the instance of the 
bishops, with whose aid in the Upper House his government 
could not afford to dispense,* warmly opposed the motion, and 
took its author roundly to task for having omitted to place 
the House of Commons in possession of the details of his 
scheme. But roundness and warmth were not words to de- 
scribe the rollicking audacity with which Charles Fox fell 
upon the prime-minister, charging him with having arbitra- 
rily invented a most unparliamentary rule of procedure in 
order to combat a proposal against which he had not been 
at the pains to bring forward a single parliamentary reason. 
Following up his speech with his vote, he took with him into 
the lobby his brother Stephen, and other members upon whose 
allegiance Lord North was accustomed to depend ; so that 
the ministry came nearer a serious defeat than they had ever 
done since the evening on which the eloquence of the same 
unaccountable young gentleman had preserved them from 
being beaten on the Nullum Tempus Bill of Sir William 

Even Rigby is told to look to liis laurels. 

" Burnish thy shining front anew. 

Shall Fox, shall Harley, Luttrell, dare 
With thine their foreheads to compare, 
Great boatswain of the Bloomsbury crew ?" 

' Lindsey to Jebb, March 3, 1772. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 393 

Mereditli. After such an cxliibition, few were surprised to 
Lear, three days later, that Fox had resigned his Commission- 
ership of the Admiralty. Few were surprised at his leaving 
office ; but everybody was discussing the why and the where- 
fore of the oratorical ebullition which rendered it impossible 
for him to stay there. The world, as its manner is, accredited 
him" with an assortment of motives tortuous and multifarious 
enough to have explained tlie retirement of a Mazarin or a 
Metternich ; but no one who has watched the growth to ma- 
turity of a powerful character can be at a loss to name the 
causes which impelled a lad of twenty-three, whose head had 
been turned by a run of unexampled success, towards a step 
which, after all, was less foolish than the world supposed it. 
Whenever a young minister goes out, he is influenced by the 
same admixture of personal and public feelings and consider- 
ations, combined in very much the same proportions. Impa- 
tience of restraint, a not dishonorable craving for real power, 
a distaste for official reticence, and an indifference to official 
dignity and emoluments engender a state of mind in which 
a diversity of view on an important question with those su- 
periors who are masters of his actions and his voice becomes 
a burden beyond his capacity for submission and self-efface- 
ment to endure. One who, according to the saying of his 
schoolfellows, thought himself fit for the privy council while 
he was still at Eton' felt it an insufferable humiliation to be 
directed how he was to speak, and when he was to liold his 
tongue, by a leader who had the advantage of him in nothing 
but in years ; and his injured self-esteem, always on the eve of 
an explosion, was kindled into flame on a sudden by a spark 
from a nobler and purer source. Charles Fox's quarrel with 
the prime-minister had its immediate origin in his ardor on 
behalf of a cause curiously unlike those which ordinarily at- 

' "Pray tell Charles what pleasure his promotion gives me. As to his 
giving himself airs about being only in the Treasury before he is of age, 
I believe he thinks he ought to have been a Privy Counsellor at Eton." 
The quotation is from a letter of Lord Carlisle to Sclwyn ; written, per- 
haps, early in 1770, wiien it was certain that Fox would have office, but 
uncertain what that office was to be. 



39J: THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

tract the enthnsiasm of tlie young ; but for which, young or 
old, he would at any moment of his life have been willing to 
sacrifice everything. 

While George the Third, severe and conscientious beyond 
his years, M'as occupied late and early with the administrative 
and ceremonial business of the State, he liad plenty of depu- 
ties to do, and somewhat to overdo, the lighter duties of roy- 
alty. During the jovial decade which intervened between 
the Seven Years' War and the American troubles, it was dif- 
ficult for a fashionable gentleman to take his pleasure in pub- 
lic or in private without meeting one or another of the king's 
younger brothers. " Every place," wrote Walpole, " is like 
one of Shakespeare's plays : ' Flourish. Enter the Duke of 
York, Gloucester, and attendants.' " Death gradually thinned 
the illustrious group, carrying off princes whom the world 
pronounced hopeful and promising in exact proportion as 
they died young. But enough remained to provoke from 
the frequenters of Ranelagh and the Pantheon a revival of 
the witty Lady Townshend's complaint — " This is the cheap- 
est family to see, and the dearest to keep, that ever was." 
The member of that family who lived at the greatest ex- 
pense, moral and pecuniary, to those with whom he came in 
contact was Ilenrj', Duke of Cumberland — the hero of scan- 
dals so frequent and so clumsily conducted that, as long as his 
Royal Highness remained a bachelor, his damages and law- 
costs seemed likely to form one of the heaviest items in the 
Civil List. He met his fate, however, in a young widow, 
whose nearest kinsman had recently given proof of a courage 
more than equal to the task of forbidding the most childish 
of libertines to pla}'' the fool with his sister. The relief of 
fashionable society at learning that the Duke of Cumberland 
was safely married was nothing to the sense of epicurean 
enjoyment with which Whigs and Wilkites heard that the 
bride's brother was no other than that gallant colonel whom 
the Court had appointed member for Middlesex. Junius was 
divided between terror lest a Luttrell should succeed to the 
crown of England and sombre merriment over the master- 
stroke of irony by which destiny had avenged him and his 



177l'-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 395 

printer upon their implacable enemy/ In a public letter lie 
called upon the injured freeholders of Middlesex to rejoice 
because a greater than themselves had now experienced what 
it was to have Luttrells forced upon him against his will ; and, 
writing confidentially to AVilkes in terms which, even after 
the lapse of a century, respect for the sceptre does not permit 
to be quoted, he urged that a deputation from the City should 
at once repair to St. James's with an address congratulating 
his Majesty on the auspicious event that had taken place in 
his family. 

The king's feelings were such that the ponderous imperti- 
nences of Junius could not make him more angry than he 
was already. Just a year before, when it became necessary 
that he should take notice of his brother's irregularities, he 
had treated the painful subject as became a high-minded and 
right-minded man ',^ but though he sternly rebuked the sin, 
he had not thought it incumbent upon him to withdraw his 
countenance from the offender. The Duke of Cumberland, 
however, was now to discover that little as George the Third 
approved his conduct towards the wives of others, he had 
committed a crime of deeper dye in procuring himself a wife 
of his own. Profligacy might be forgiven ; but there was no 
pardon for the step by which alone the profligate could ever 
be reclaimed. Nor can the freedom with which the king 
gave vent to his irritation be explained by his contempt for 
the levit}'" of his brother, and his resentment at the designing 
ambition of his brother's wife ; for his wrath was still hotter 
against a pair of lovers whose character gave them a claim to 
respect which had been strengthened, rather than forfeited, 
by their behavior under circumstances as trying as any in 
which two human beings can find themselves implicated. 

' Junius to the Duke of Grafton, November 23, 1771. 

' "I cannot enough express," he wrote m Novemljer, 1770, with refer- 
ence to the Duke of Cumbcrhind's most notorious ti'ansgrcssion, " how 
mucli I feel at being in the least concerned in an at^air that my way of 
thinking has ever taught me to behold as highly improper; but I flatter 
myself the truths I have thought it incumbent to utter may be of some 
use in his future conduct," 



396 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

The Duke of Gloucester, as far back as September, 1766, 
had been privately married to the widow of Lord Waldegrave 
— that wise and upright man who, alone among the guardians 
of George the Third's childhood, did anything but harm to a 
prince whose nature he so clearly read, and the deiiciences of 
whose so-called education he so honestly labored to supple- 
ment. Gratitude and esteem may have been the strongest 
feelings which attracted Lady Waldegrave into her first mar- 
riage ; but her second was a true love-match. The natural 
child of Sir Edward Walpole, she was so far from coveting 
a royal connection, for royalty's sake, that she shrank from 
honors which could not fail to bring into prominence the 
story of her birth.' That misfortune apart, she was wanting 
in nothing which could justify the choice of her husband or 
mollify the displeasure of her brother-in-law. She was the 
favorite sitter of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by whom her portrait 
was seven times eagerly and carefully painted in every stage 
of her beauty ; and when, in our own time, the papers of the 
great artist were brought to light, a lock of golden-brown 
hair marked as hers was discovered in a recess of his jDocket- 
book. And her mind was not unworthy of its casket. The 
constancy, the resignation, the touching humility, with which 
she endured a persecution exquisitely calculated to aggravate 
everything that was most distressing in her situation, gave 
value and beauty to letters which were fondly pronounced to 
be inimitable by the best judge of letters that ever lived. " I 
have always thought," said Horace Walpole, after reading the 
lines in which the Duchess of Gloucester confessed the mar- 
riage to her father, " that feeling bestows the most sublime 
eloquence, and that women write better letters than men. I, 
a M'riter in some esteem, and all my life a letter-writer, never 
penned anything like this letter of my niece. How mean 
did my prudence appear compared with hers, which was void 
of all personal considerations but of her honor !" Walpole, 

^ " She asked me," said her uncle Horace, " if I did not approve of her 
signing ' Maria Gloucester,' instead of simply ' Maria,' in the royal style ; 
'for,' said she, modestly, 'there was a time when I had no right to any 
name but Maria.' " 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 397 

however, in so saying, did himself scanty justice ; for his 
promptitude in ranging himself on the side of the weak, and 
his high-bred plain-dealing with the strong, proved that age 
and illness had done nothing to impair that stoutness of heart 
which, as often as his sense of honor or of justice w\as aroused, 
never failed to show that he was Sir Robert's son/ 

From boyhood upwards, as Lord Waldegrave noted, and as 
his widow was destined to feel, George the Third was never 
angry without something coming of it.^ The knowledge of 
what one brother had just done, and the suspicion of what 
another had done long ago, determined the king to a course 
of action most characteristic of its author in boldness of con- 
ception and inflexibility of execution. There was no ques- 
tion but that the younger members of the royal family were 
defenceless, as far as the law could defend them, against the 
matrimonial schemes of adventurers and adventuresses. In 
1753 they had been exempted from the protection of the Mar- 
riage Act by the special desire of George the Second ; and 
George the Third, correcting the omission of his predecessor, 
now made up his mind to protect them with a vengeance. It 
would have been a very easy matter to devise means by which 
princes and princesses might be shielded from the dangers of 

* " I wrote to Lord Hertford a letter -wlneli I meant he should show to 
the king, couched in the most respectful terms, in which I stated my own 
ignorance of the marriage till owned, but said that, concluding the new 
duchess's family could not be very welcome at St. James's, I should not 
presume to present myself there without leave. I mentioned having 
waited on the duke as a duty, due for the honor he had done the family, 
and to the tenderness I had always felt for my niece, whom were I to 
abandon I should expect his Majesty's own paternal aflectious would 
make him despise me. This letter I enclosed in a cover in which I told 
Lord Hertford plainly that if it was expected I should not see my niece, 
I was determined rather to give up going to St. James's." 

^ " Whenever he is displeased," wrote Lord Waldegrave of his royal 
pupil, " his anger does not break out with heat and A'iolence, but he be- 
comes sullen and silent, and retires to his closet, not to comiiose his mind 
by study and contemplation, Ijut merely to indulge the melancholy en- 
joyment of his own ill-humor. Even when the fit is ended, unfovorable 
symptoms very frequently return which indicate that on certain occasions 
his Royal Highness has too correct a memory." 



398 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X, 

tlieir own ignorance and imprndencc till tliey liad reached 
the age of discretion, and bj which, if they then persisted in 
ruining themselves, the nation might be preserved from suf- 
fering by their folly. A short act, giving their parents and 
guardians power over the actions of those among them who 
were not yet of age, and requiring the consent of Parliament 
to the marriage of all who came within a reasonable distance 
of the throne, would not have needed a Mansfield to draft or 
a Thurlow and a AVedderburn to expound and advocate. But 
the aim which George the Third had in view was not to as- 
sure the succession to the crown, but to extend the authority 
of the individual who wore it. The preamble of the bill — 
which he had resolved to turn into a statute, even if he stood 
alone as its sincere supporter — asserted (or, as the Whigs main- 
tained, invented) the doctrine that the right of approving or 
forbidding marriages in the royal family had always been in- 
trusted to the reigning monarch ; and the substance of the 
enactment was of a piece with its exordium. The occupant 
of the throne, whatever his age, whatever his inexperience, 
might follow his own fancy in the selection of a consort. The 
occupant of the throne, wdiatever his character, whatever his 
antecedents, was appointed confidant and arbiter of the love- 
affairs of scores and hundreds of people, the rank and status 
of whose wives and husbands, in the vast majority of instances, 
concerned the public interests no more than if they had been 
so many tradesmen or mechanics. No descendant of George 
the Second, to the end of time, unless he were by birth a for- 
eigner, might marry before six-and-twenty without the con- 
sent of the sovereign, unless he w^as prepared to see his chil- 
dren stamped as illegitimate, and their mother excluded from 
the recognition of society.' And where " the king's poor 

' The pleasaiitest tiling said or written on the most unpleasant of sub- 
jects was the answer to Dowdeswell's objection that a prince, who might 
reign at eighteen, was not allowed to marry as he liked till six-and-twen- 
ty. The obvious retort that it was easier to rule a kingdom than a wifo 
made matter for an epigram, in the sliape of a conversation between the 
Dick and Tom whom the rather vulgar taste of our ancestors had adopt- 
ed as representatives of the Rufus and Caecilianus of Martial. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 399 

cousin" was a woman, a consequence was threatened which 
George tlie Third, when he insisted on transmitting to liis 
successors tlie privilege that he chiimed for himself, can hard- 
ly have foreseen. Nothing but the good-fortune of our ro^^al 
house has spared it a state of things under which girls M'ould 
have had no choice hut to disclose their fondest affections 
and tlieir most cherished hopes to the inquisition of a volup- 
tuary M'hose threshold no respectable matron would submit 
to cross. The bill, which never could have been popular, had 
the additional misfortune of being introduced on the morrow 
of a domestic catastrophe with Avhich Europe was ringing. 
Those horrible tidings which arrived from Denmark on the 
twenty-ninth of January, 1772, were strange data on which to 
ground the necessity for a law framed with the express object 
of insuring that, thenceforward and forever, royalty should 
only mate with royalty. The most hardened men of the world 
confessed to being shocked when, with such news barely three 
weeks old, the wretched Caroline's brother invited his Parlia- 
ment to consider a scheme of legislation under wdiich British 
princesses might have to choose between a lifetime of celi- 
bacy and an ill-assorted official union like that which just then 
was dissolving amidst a scene of blood and misery such as could 
be paralleled only in the imagination of the dramatist.' 

Harder men of the world than the members of his govern- 
ment the king must have gone far afield to seek ; and even 
they quailed at the work which lay before them. Lord Mans- 
field, who had drawn the bill, was the only ministerialist lead- 
er who did not hint dislike of it when on his legs and openly 
abuse it in his cups;'^ but his share of the task was compara- 

' Surprise was expressed in society that so good a courtier as Garrick 
bad given " Hamlet" within a twelvemonth of the real tragedj' at Elsiuore. 
"It is difficult," wrote Sir James Mackintosh, in his essay on Struensee, 
"to contain the indignation which naturally arises from the reflection 
that at this very time, and with a full knowledge of the fate of the Queen 
of Denmark, the Royal Marriage Act was passed in England for the avow- 
ed purpose of preventing the only marriages of preference which a j)rin- 
cess, at least, has commonly tlie opportunity of forming." 

^ "One thing remarkable is," wrote Lord Shelburne to Chatham, "that 
the king has not a servant in either House, except the Chief-justice of 



400 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

tively a light one. The Marriage Bill had an easy journey 
through a House of Peers from which Chatham was detained 
by a " winter account of gout, to be balanced after a summer 
of health " such as he had not known for twenty years, and 
where the Episcopal bench supplied a casuist M'ho had the 
nerve to descant volubly and minutely upon those features in 
the controversy which such laymen as Sandwich and Wey- 
mouth avoided as indelicate.' But the debating in the Lords 
was not altogether unproductive of good; for an admirable 
protest, with the names of Richmond and Fitzwilliam at the 
head of the signatures, served as a brief to indicate the lines 
on which the question was subsequently fought in the Com- 
mons. The skilled constitutional speakers of the Lower House 
dwelt with unanswerable force on the confusion that might 
ensue if the power of altering the order of succession, by an- 
nulling a marriage and declaring its issue illegitimate, fell 
into the hands of a monarch who had favorites among his 
sons ; on the untenable character of the assumption that such 
a power had always belonged of right to the wearer of the 
crown ; and on the certainty that Englishmen would prefer 
the offspring of a prince who, with or without leave, had mar- 
ried an Englishwoman to the offspring of a princess who had 
been duly and solemnly handed over to the nephew of an 

the King's Bench can be called so, who will own the bill, or who has re- 
frained from every public insinuation against it," A few days before the 
measure finally passed the Commons, Wedderburn was dining with Fox 
and other senatorial dandies. " They got drunk, and Wedderburn blab- 
bed that he and Thurlow had each drawn the plan of an unexceptiona- 
ble bill, but that Lord IMansfield had said they were both nonsense, had 
rejected them, and then himself drew the present bill. 'And, damn him,' 
added Wedderburn, ' when he called my bill nonsense, did he think I 
would defend him V " 

' The Bishop of Oxford's exposition of the moral danger of preventing 
men of high rank from making marriages of inclination was answered by 
his brother of Gloucester in a strain which awakened the disgust of all 
who remembered the almost blasphemous fervor of his invectives against 
the " Essay on Woman," and pleased nobody except a few loose-lived peers. 
Now that he had the bishoj^'s sanction, said an earl who had more wit 
than grace, he should drive with his chariot and liveries to places whith- 
er he had hitherto been in the habit of going incognito. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 401 

elector or the younger son of a landgrave, even if that pref- 
erence could only be vindicated at the expense of a revolu- 
tion. " Laws,'' said Burke, " have till now been passed for 
the purpose of explaining doubts; but this is a law made to 
create tlieni f and then he turned from the perils in which 
the proposed measure would involve the State to the hard- 
ship which it would inflict upon the individual. Proudly 
conscious that the truest proof of loyalty was to save the king 
from himself, and resolved that, if in after-years the sons of 
George the Third were driven into courses like those from 
which their uncle had just been rescued by a marriage such 
as they themselves would be forbidden to make,' their father 
should only have himself to blame, the orator, who had so 
often withstood the prerogative in its encroachments upon 
liberty, now exclaimed against its exaltation at the cost of our 
common humanity. Amidst the breathless attention of friend 
and foe, he closed a magnificent rhapsody with a stroke of 
histrionic effect more spontaneous, and therefore more im- 
pressive, tlian the dagger scene w^hich was the most famous, 
but far from the most happy, example of his later manner. 
Making as if he saw the lord-chief-justice himself, pen in 
hand, on the floor before him — " He has no child," he cried, 
" who first formed this bill. He is no judge of the crime of 
following nature." 

The ministers, few of whom had lived after a fashion which 
gave them a sense of security at a time when such personali- 
ties were flying about, maintained, for the most part, a prudent 
silence; and even the king's friends could with difficulty be 
got to say a word in favor of a measure which, except in a 
speech, no man ever called by any other name than the King's 
Bill. Conway, who was so far a minister that he acted as mas- 
ter-general of the ordnance — though he had declined to accept 
the salary and the title of an office the work of which he was 
doing in a spirit worthy of a purer age — refused to flatter the 

* The objects sought by the jMarriage Act, and its consequences to the 
next generation of the royal famil}', are stated by Mr. Masscy, with excel- 
lent taste and feeling, in the sixteenth chapter of his " History of England 
under George the Third." 

26 



402 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

House of Commons by pretendiiig that in entertaining the 
proposal of the cabinet it was actuated by a feeling of public 
duty. " "Were I capable," he cried, " of paying compliments 
on this occasion, I should think my tongue would wither in 
my mouth." And, indeed, the temper of his audience was 
such that anything might have been spoken with impunity. 
The supporters of the government, as fathers and husbands, 
were in a mood to pardon the most extreme violence of lan- 
guage that could be directed against a laM- for which, as place- 
men, they we-re prepared to vote. When Lord Xorth, by 
turning the debate on to a point of order, attempted to evade 
an attack which his boldest colleagues could not be prevailed 
on to face, so decorous an ex-ofScial as Mr, Thomas Townshend. 
was heard to shout, " Let us have no dirty tricks." In the 
dearth of oratorical courage which seemed likely to endanger 
the fortunes of the bill, and possibly of the ministry, the 
Speaker, whose faults were not in the direction of timidity, was 
induced to descend into the lists ; but he was no sooner back 
beneath his canopy than he found himself pelted with sar- 
casms against which his character afforded him the scantiest 
protection. "Consider, sir," said. Burke, "that the bill will 
operate when you shall be enjoying in another world the re- 
wards of a life well spent in this " — a glance into the future 
much appreciated by an assembly which had observed noth- 
ing in Sir Fletcher Norton's parliamentary career inconsistent 
with the reputation for taking fees from both sides that he 
had acquired during his practice at the bar. And the House 
cheered like a parcel of insubordinate schoolboys when Barre, 
availing himself still more freely of the form of addressing 
the chair, in order to talk at its occupant, gave vent, with a 
breadth of jDhrase in which the contemporaries of Smollett 
saw nothing amiss, to the most astounding impertinence that 
the member of a senate ever ventured to level against its 
president.' 

But the reluctance of the cabinet was not proof against the 
determination of the Court. The author of the Koyal Mar- 

' Last Journals of Walpole, March 11,1773. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 403 

riage Bill would as soon have witlidrawii it because his min- 
isters were afraid of the House of Commons as his uncle of 
Cumberland would have altered his tactics at Culloden for 
fear lest his colonels should be nervous under fire. In thirteen 
letters, brief and peremptory as the slips of paper which an 
aide-de-camp carries along the line of battle, George the Third, 
throughout the whole duration of the contest, dictated to Lord 
North the orders of the day. Nothing could be better adapt- 
ed to the purpose which they were intended to effect than the 
king's exhortations to sustained and vigorous action, than the 
clear and practical suggestions with which he met every 
change of strategy on the part of the Opposition leaders, and 
than the threats against deserters and sluggards from which 
the prime-minister was permitted to draw a salutary warning 
for his own guidance. " Lord North's attention," wrote his 
Majesty, " in correcting the impression I had that Colonel 
Burgoyne and Lieutenant-colonel Harcourt were absent yes- 
terday is very handsome to those gentlemen ; for I certainly 
should have thought myself obliged to have named a new 
governor in the room of the former, and to have removed the 
other from my bedchamber." Conway was pitilessly bullied 
through his brother, the lord chamberlain ; and less formida- 
ble defaulters were punished by his Majesty in person at a 
drawing-room which was held while the fate of the bill was 
still uncertain. But no stress of discij^line could keep the 
ministerial ranks from melting away at a rate of decrease that 
terrified the drill-sergeants of the Treasury. A measure which 
had passed the second reading by two hundred and sixty-eight 
votes to one hundred and forty was hustled through its final 
stage by a bare majority of eighteen ; while among the knot 
of members who stood grumbling on the wrong side of the 
door, no less than twelve out of fourteen had missed by a 
minute the satisfaction of yet further swelling the numbers 
of the Opposition. 

The discussion had all along been conducted in the utmost 
secrec3\ Peers begged in vain for admittance ; and reporters 
were so rigidly excluded that a debate of ten hours hardly 
provided the newspapers with material for a score of lines. 



404 THE EAELY HISTOllY OF [Chap. X. 

The danger to liberty of concealing the proceedings in Par- 
liament from the public gaze was forcibly illustrated by tlie 
apathy displayed by a high-spirited- people towards a con- 
trov^ersy which stirred a submissive House of Commons to the 
verge of revolt. The unpopularity of the Marriage Bill was 
confined to London society ; and the sentiment, strong every- 
where within those narrow limits, had the focus of its intensity 
in Lord Holland's domestic circle. For there the family tra- 
ditions were all against arbitrary restrictions upon the freedom 
of marriage, and the family character was instinctively opposed 
to any restraint being placed upon the impulses of human nat- 
ure. Tlie offspring of a runaway match with a descendant of 
royalty, Charles Fox was not the man to prescribe by statute 
the level above which a lad of spirit was forbidden to lift his 
eyes. The nephew of one who, but for the interference of 
Bute and the Princess Poyal, would at that moment have been 
Queen of England, he scorned to vote in obedient silence for 
a measure inspired (so the world believed) by the influence of 
that very pair M'ho had stood between his kinswoman and the 
throne. That the suitor of Lady Sarah Lennox should make 
it a crime for his own sons to marry a subject was regarded 
at Holland House as an act of treason against reminiscences 
which ten years should have been too short to profane. "I 
should not," Fox wrote to the Earl of Upper Ossory, " have 
resigned at this moment merely on account of my complaints 
against Lord North, if I had not determined to vote against 
this Royal Family Bill, which in place I should be ashamed of 
doing. Upon the whole, I am convinced I did right ; and I 
think myself very safe from going into opposition, which is 
the only danger. I am convinced, if you M'ere to know the 
whole state of the case, I should have your approbation, which, 
I can assure you, would make me very happy," But, however 
much he might covet the esteem of liis relative, the young 
fellow did not choose to make himself out more disinterested 
than he was. His letter was embedded in a mass of jDrefaces, 
postscripts, and comments from the pen of Mr. John Craw- 
ford, his confidant and sworn admirer, who very frankly dis- 
closed to Lord Ossory those views and feelings, of a personal 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 405 

rather than a public nature, which were among the forces that 
contributed their weight towards driving Fox from the Ad- 
miralty. " Charles," wrote Crawford, in a passage which Fox 
had read and allowed to stand, " has this day resigned. He 
had not any one particular reason for this step ; but, upon the 
whole, he thought Lord North did not treat him with the con- 
fidence and attention he used to do. It is better to err by too 
much spirit than by too little ; and as Charles does not mean 
to go into opposition, and is always worth a better place than 
what he had, it is my opinion that what he has done will do 
him credit, and turn out to his advantage every w^ay." 

That opinion was not shared by Lord Holland. It was be- 
lieved in the clubs that the father had urged the son to quit 
the government, in order that he might be free to devote him- 
self to the advancement of a legislative crotchet which the 
two cultivated in common; "and Charles" (observed Gibbon, 
in one of those sentences which render his "Memoirs" the fa- 
vorite book of readers who hold the secret of good writing to 
lie in saying the most with the least show of effort and expend- 
iture of type) " very judiciously thought that Lord Holland's 
friendship imported him more than Lord North's." But the 
town had not got the right story. The old statesman loved 
the ministry, and had reason to love it, as little as the world 
had loved him when he was himself a minister ; but he came 
of a school which did not make politics an affair of sentiment. 
" Whatever cause of ill-humor," said the third Lord Holland, 
" my grandfather might have, it was not probable from the 
habits of his life that he would indulge it by going into oppo- 
sition." As a matter of fact. Lord Holland's dissatisfaction at 
the step which his son had taken came as near displeasure as 
was possible with Charles for the object of it. But his annoy- 
ance was nothing to Lord North's alarm. If it had been a 
secretary of state, with half a dozen cousins in the House of 
Lords and a score of clients in the Commons, threatening to 
take himself and his connection into the camp of the enemy, 
the prime-minister could not have been more perturbed than 
at the desertion of a junior lord whose property was a great 
deal less than nothing, and whose party consisted of a brother 



406 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

and a couple of sclioolfellows. North was instant with Fox 
to withdraw his resignation, and profuse in such apologies for 
his own real or fancied incivilitj^ as are seldom offered by the 
head of the Board of Treasury to the lowest on the Board of 
Admiralty. But the young gentleman, before he went to the 
interview, had announced his intention of leaving office to 
those among his acquaintance whom he deemed worthy of 
the information ; and his self-respect would not allow him to 
surrender himself to the unfamiliar process of being talked 
over. As soon as it became plain that there was no hope of 
keeping him, a panic ensued in the higher circles of the State. 
Lord Temple, who had wished to get rid of the Marriage Bill 
without upsetting the cabinet, went three times to Court for 
the purpose of assuring his Majesty that, much as he disliked 
the proposed law, he would do nothing to weaken a ministry 
which had received so paralyzing a shock ; and Lord Mans- 
field hastened to expunge the most objectionable feature in 
his original draft of a measure which was within twenty-four 
hours of being submitted to Parliament, in order to provide 
the large contingent of peers whom the defection of Charles 
Fox had frightened back into their allegiance with a decent 
excuse for supporting the government.' 

The sacrifice did something towards reconciling the Mar- 
riage Act with the laws of humanity ; but it entirely failed to 
propitiate Fox. His first speech was in so moderate, and even 
subdued, a tone that Burke remarked that the dissent of some 
gentlemen was the opposition of half an hour. But the young 



' Tlie bill, as it was drawn, made the consent of the sovereign a 
necessary condition for the validity of a marriage contracted by any 
descendant of George the Second during the term of his or her 
natural life. The tirst fruit of Fox's resignation was, that members of 
the royal family were allowed to marry at the age of six-and-twenty, 
unless both Houses of Parliament interfered with an express vote of dis- 
approval. 

Till Fox, by going out, made the Marriage Bill a stand-and-fall ques- 
tion, few expected that it would ever become law. According to a para- 
graph in the newspapers, a peer had laid five thousand guineas to one 
thousand against its passing. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. . 407 

ex-official belonged to a class in whom self-control is, for their 
adversaries, the most dangerous of symptoms. Long before 
the bill left the Commons, Fox, by a succession of attacks 
upon Sir Fletcher Norton, had proved that he possessed in 
the highest excellence two supreme qualifications of the ora- 
tor — the art of assailing a bad cause in the person of a ques- 
tionable individual, and the art of bringing home to the mind, 
without inflicting the forms of a moral lecture upon the ear, 
a clear notion of the connection between the passing contro- 
versy of the day and those eternal principles of right and 
wrong which men of all parties profess to venerate. He soon 
established over the ministerial speakers the marked superior- 
ity in questions of detail which a disputant who has mastered 
principles never fails to obtain over antagonists who have 
begged them. Following Thurlow and AVedderburn, closely 
and warily, from point to point; enticing them into indefensi- 
ble positions, and suddenly turning and pushing them fiercely 
until they yielded in confusion ; eliciting from them contra- 
dictory admissions and assertions, and then warning a silent 
and all but repentant House that this was the first penal law 
which had ever been passed with the lawyers differing ; forc- 
ing the attorney -general to take refuge in a vague but hum- 
ble confession that the bill would need to be altered '• accord- 
ing as exigencies should arise" — Fox honestly and laboriously 
earned the enthusiastic applause that greeted his fine rhetorical 
description of the "glorious uncertainty which always attends 
the law." There was joy in Kensington and at King's Gate 
over the notable success with which this chip of the old block 
had taken up the paternal quarrel with the gentlemen of the 
long robe, who had enjoyed an easy time in the Commons 
ever since Henry Fox had succumbed to gout and unpopu- 
larity. And patriots of a very different cast from Lord Hol- 
land rejoiced to observe that the young statesman spoke bet- 
ter in proportion as his cause was good ; and that, as an ex- 
ponent of the feelings and convictions of the wiser and more 
thoughtful among his fellow-countrjnnen, he rose quietly and 
naturally to a strain which he had never compassed in the 
days when he obeyed the bent of his own humors and preju- 



408 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

dices. It was generally and willingly admitted tliat, as a force 
in politics, "Fox's logic" was equivalent to Burke's power of 
moving the passions, and to the persuasive influence of Con- 
way's example and character; and the veterans of the House, 
employing the most valued and envied compliment which in 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one English gentle- 
man could bestow upon another, declared that, as " a Parlia- 
ment man," Charles Fox at three-and-twenty excelled Charles 
Townshend in his maturity. 

The feeling which inspired the most prominent opponent 
of the Koyal Marriage Bill was no hasty or isolated impulse. 
It was intimately allied to a sentim.ent which, springing natu- 
rally in such a disposition as that of Fox, profoundly affected 
his literary judgment, altered the whole current of his later 
life, and at this particular period directed, and almost monop- 
olized, his political energies. The member and the idol of a 
society whose mode of talking on the most delicate of topics 
was such as it is more seemly to condemn in general terras 
than to illustrate by selected quotations — and credited, as a 
young man, with living after the fashion in which an unmar- 
ried associate of March and Selwyn might not uncharitably 
be assumed to live — lie never caught the tone of cynicism 
which was the fashion among the men of his circle ; and still 
less was his secret and unspoken creed akin to theirs. He had 
been brought up in a home where intense and tender conjugal 
affection was rendered doubly attractive by the presence of 
good sense, and that perfect good-breeding which is uncon- 
scious of its own existence ; and his favorite books, from child- 
hood upwards, were those in which the image of such a home 
was painted in the brightest colors and gilded by the noblest 
"associations. He loved Homer, because Homer " always spoke 
well of women." In the teeth of Athenian prejudice, which 
so good a scholar respected more than the prejudices of his 
own day, he could hardly venture to give the same reason for 
loving Euripides; but probably no one ever praised, read, re- 
cited, analyzed, and translated any piece of poetry so frequent- 
ly^, for the benefit of so many different individuals, as did Fox 
the passage where Alcestis, before her act of self-sacrifice, takes 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 409 

leave of her brldal-cliainber.' And his romance was of the 
heart, and not of the fancy. There have been few better 
husbands than Fox, and probably none so delightful ; for no 
known man ever devoted such powers of pleasing to the sin- 
gle end of making a wife happy. AVhen once he had a home 
of his own, the world outside, with its pleasures and ambitions, 
became to him an object of indifference, and at last of repug- 
nance. Nothing but the stings of a patriotic conscience, 
sharpened by the passionate importunity of partisans whose 
fidelity had "entitled them to an absolute claim upon his ser- 
vices, could prevail upon him to spend opposite, or even on, 
the Treasury bench an occasional fragment of the hours 
which were never long enough when passed at Mrs. Fox's 

work-table with Congreve or Moliere as a third in company.' 

j_ ^1 ^ . 

' In 180G he lent the " Alcestis" to his young secretary without telling 
him that there was anything exceptionally touching in it, and then cov- 
ertly watched the countenance of the reader for an indication of the 
manner in which the lines would affect one who came upon them unex- 
pectedly. Macaulay, in the margin of his Euripides, marked the passage 
as "the most beautiful narration that I remember in the whole Attic 
drama;" and, as his annotations show, he liked it all the better because 
Fox had liked it before him. 

"" In 1800 Fox came up from St. Anne's Hill at an important crisis, on 
the understanding that he would have to remain only two nights in 
town. " When," said Lord Holland, " he heard that the debate was 
postponed in consequence of Mr. Pitt's indisposition, he sat silent and 
overco)ne, as if the intelligence of some great calamity had reached his 
ears. I saw tears steal down his cheeks ; so vexed was he at being de- 
tained from his garden, his books, and his cheerful life in the country." 
"Never did a letter," wrote Fox, in 1801, " arrive at a worse time, my 
dear young one, than yours this morning. A sweet westerly wind, a 
beautiful suu, all the thorns and elms just budding, and the nightingales 
just beginning to sing; though the blackbirds and thrushes would have 
been quite sufficient to have refuted any arguments in your letter. Seri- 
ously speaking, I cannot conceive what you mean by everybody agreeing 
that something may be now done. I beg, at least, not to be included in 
the holders of that opinion. I would, nevertheless, go to town if I saw 
any chance of ray going being serviceable to the public, or (which, in my 
view of things, is exactly the same thing) to the party which I love both 
as a party and on account of many of the individuals who compose it." 
" I wish I were member for Westminster," said Lord Lauderdale. " I 



4:10 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

Fox, from twenty to twenty-five, had doubtless not the air 
of a rigid moralist. The world could not believe that the 
king of the macaronis w^ore the most audacious costumes, 
and carried the largest nosegay in London, for nothing; and 
the suspicions of the world were freely expressed by the verse- 
writers of society. 

" Here Charles his native eloquence refined, 
Pleased at the toilet, in the senate shined ; 
And North approved, and Amoret looked kind." 

But he was involved in no overt scandal. He broke up no 
man's home. He did not add a paragraph to the chronicle 
of sin and misery in wdiicli companions and relatives of his 
own conspicuously figured. A Lovelace never would have 
won or valued the enthusiastic friendship with which Fox 
was honored by so many high-minded women, whose loyalty 
to his interests at a great crisis has furnished some of the 
most agreeable among the stock anecdotes of English history. 
The secret of the certainty w^ith which he pleased those of the 
other sex wdio were best worth pleasing is clearly revealed 
in the letters addressed by the Duchess of Devonshire to her 
mother, and still more clearly in the letters which Fox ad- 
dressed to the duchess herself. His notion of true gallantry 
was to treat women as beings who stood on the same intel- 
lectual table-land as himself; to give them the very best of 
his thought and his knowledge, as well as of his humor and 
his eloquence ; to invite and weigh their advice in seasons of 
difficulty ; and, if ever they urged him to steps which his 
judgment or his conscience disapproved, not to elude them 
with half-contemptuous banter, but to convince them by plain- 
spoken and serious remonstrance.' The arts by which Fox 

wish I were a Scotch peer," replied Fox ; " for then I should be dis- 
qualified." 

* "My dear Duchess," Fox wrote, in February, 1806, when the Whig 
ministry was forming, " your note has distressed me to the greatest de- 
gree. I told Lord explicitly that it was very doubtful wliether I 

should have anything to propose to him ; and, indeed, it is quite impos- 
sible now, unless your brother would give ujd Lord Altliorpe's having a 
place at one of tlie l^oards. Can I give up Jack Townshend, or Courte- 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 411 

retained the affectionate regard of the Duchess of Devonshire, 
until it was elevated into a devotion honorable to herself and 
to him, belong to a later and graver period of their lives ; but 
allusions to the qualities -which lirst recommended him to her 
admiration and esteem are scattered, only too sparsely, through 
the earlier portion of her familiar correspondence. " We re- 
turned to Chatsworth this morning," she wrote on the four- 
teenth of August, 1777. " Mr. Fox came in the evening from 
town — Charles Fox a V ordmaii'e. I have always thought that 
his great merit is his amazing quickness in seizing any subject. 
He seems to have the particular talent of knowing more about 
what he is saying, and with less pains, than anybody else. 
His conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards: the 
strokes follow one another, piff ! paff ! And what makes him 
more entertaining is his being here with Mr. Townshend and 
the Duke of Devonshire ; for their being so much together in 
town makes them show off one another. Their chief topics 
are politics and Shakespeare. As for the latter, they all three 
have the most astonishing memory for it. I suppose I shall 
be able in time to go through a play as they do." 

But Charles Fox's chivalry did not stop with the great and 
the fortunate. 

"Then gently scan your brother man, 
Still gentler sister woman,'' 

was the saying of a poet with whom, for good and evil, he 

nay, or Fitzimtrick, or Lord Robert for any of these young lords? Indeed, 
indeed, my friends are liard upon me." 

That was the strain in which, on occasion, Fox would write to tlie 
Ducliess of Devonshire. How she wrote of him is prettily exemplified in 
a letter of hers to Lord Hartiugton, dated the twenty-third of the previous 
month. "Mr. Fox was with your father to-day, and pleased Mm mucli 
by his manner about Pitt. Your father said it was impossible not to feel 
shocked at the death of a person of such importance and former consid- 
eration. Mr. Fox agreed, and said that to him it appeared as if there 
was something missing in the world. The more you know of Mr. Fox's 
character, the more you will admire the great features of his mind — the 
vast comjirehension that takes in any subject, united to a candor and 
benevolence that render him as amiable as he is great." 



412 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

had much in common;' and it was the precept which, of all 
others, he honored bj his observance. " Do you not hate that 
fellow?" he was once asked, with reference to a member of 
Parliament who irritated the AVhigs by the virulence of his 
speaking, and bored them by its prolixity. "Ah, well!" re- 
plied Fox, " I am a bad hater." And though, during his first 
half-dozen sessions, he could sometimes work himself up into 
the illusion that he detested political opponents wdiom he 
would never have voluntarily and deliberately injured, his in- 
dulgence towards the weaker half of humanitj^ was already 
without stint or limit. Whenever, rich or poor, blameless or 
erring, a woman was in trouble, she always was sure of a 
champion in Fox. The spring sitting of 1772 was, as far as 
he was concerned, one long effort for the protection of the 
helpless and the unhappy. He advocated, without success, 
an alteration of the laws which rendered the mother of an 
illegitimate child liable to a degrading punishment if she con- 
fessed the birth, and which condemned her to the gallows if 
she was shamed or terrified into concealing it. He success- 
fully opposed a bill framed to forbid the marriage of a di- 
vorced wife with her seducer — an ordinance which would 
have made sad havoc with the prospects of some of the most 
famous ladies of the day. But he was never so much in ear- 
nest as when inveighing against that penal legislation which 
he regarded as a standing insult to his own parents, whose 
love-story it desecrated by linking it with the idea of the con- 
stable, the dock, and the jail. He denounced the statute 
which refused the benefit of clergy to any one who carried 
off a woman with the intention of forcing her into marriage, 
on the ground that an angry father or guardian would not be 
in a temper to discriminate very nicely between an elopement 
and an abduction ; while the wife, as no longer a legal wit- 
ness, might see her husband hanged for a crime against her- 
self in which she had been an accomplice before the act. 
And, eager to show that he could legislate with the wisest as 

' " Burns," he said, " was about as clever a man as ever lived. Lord 
Sidmouth thought hini a better poet than Cowj^er. I cannot say but 
he had a better understanding." 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 413 

well as speak with the cleverest, he would not be satisfied un- 
til he had himself introduced a bill for the repeal of that Mar- 
riage Act of Lord Hardwicke's devising to which nineteen 
years had not reconciled Henry Fox or Henry Fox's son. 
His handling of the question Avas signalized by extraordinary 
dexterit}^, and quite as extraordinary heedlessness and caprice. 
On the seventh of April, by an easy and extemporaneons dis- 
play of ability, the circumstantial and well-attested narrative 
of which reads like a miracle, he steered his enterprise safely 
through its first perils, under the fire of Burke's best oratory 
from one side of the House and Lord North's emphatic dis- 
approval on the other. The impetus of that night's debate 
carried smoothly and silently, into the last stage but one, a 
measure upon which its author was too busy with his amuse- 
ments to bestow any further trouble, while the Treasury man- 
agers kept on it a watchful and malevolent eye. On the nine- 
teenth of May, Fox drove in from l^ewmarket just in time for 
a division which, by a majority of three to one, extinguished 
his hopes when they seemed to have reached the very edge of 
fruition ; and with that catastrophe ended, for the present at 
least, his schemes for improving the relations between the 
sexes. 

Erratic and abnormal as was the public career of Fox, his 
private life was just as little conformed to ordinary rules and 
precedents. 'No one thought of classing him among the com- 
mon rakes and spendthrifts of the day, and still less among 
its respectabilities. So exceptional a personage did he appear 
to his own contemporaries that, in search of a comparison for 
liim, they were in the habit of going back to Julius Caesar; 
and it is not easy, even for a generation which thinks less about 
the Romans and knows more of the people who have come 
since them than the readers of the eighteenth century, to find 
any parallel for Charles Fox more recent than the young pa- 
trician who was worth proscribing at eighteen ; who was a 
renowned orator at two-and-twenty ; who led fashion almost 
from the moment that he assumed the toga; and who ow'ed 
more money than Crassns ever gathered or Apicius squan- 
dered. 



414 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

There exists at Brooks's Club a curious memorial of the so- 
ciety in which Fox lived, and of the constant and minute at- 
tention which that society bestowed upon all his proceedings. 
As far back as the reign of William the Third, foreigners had 
observed that, on matters great and small, the only sure test 
of English opinions was the state of the odds. Our ancestors 
were men of their hands — more ready with sword and purse 
than with word and pen — who regarded a duel as the natural 
issue of a quarrel, and a bet as the most authoritative solution 
of an argument. To drag through newspapers and laM^-conrts 
the lengthening scandal of a dispute which a single interview 
in one of the parks would settle with credit, if not with satis- 
faction, to both parties was not more repugnant to their idea 
of what was becoming and convenient than to spend twenty 
minutes in confuting a man who had so little faith in his own 
view that he would not back it with twenty guineas. But, 
by the time George the Third was on the throne, persons of 
rank and position were tired of being challenged to stake 
their money by frequenters of public coffee-houses whose ca- 
pacity to pay was doubtful, and about whose anticipations as 
to the date of the coming dissolution and the destination of 
the next blue ribbon they did not care a farthing. The first 
London clubs of the model to which that name is now exclu- 
sively applied were instituted, among other kindred purposes, 
with the object of providing the world of fashion with a cen- 
tral office for making wagers, and a registry for recording them. 
And so it comes about that the betting-book at Brooks's has 
an interest of its owm which resembles nothing in any library 
or museum in the countr3^ The entries in its pages, most 
characteristic of the time and the men, standing, each in tlieir 
proper order, between the covers within which they were 
originally written — uniform in their general character, but 
with variety of detail as inexhaustible as the circumstances of 
our national history and the changes in our national manners 
— form a volume wdiich is to an ordinary collection of auto- 
graphs what the " Liber Veritatis " of Claude is to a portfolio 
of detached sketches by the great masters. Fifty guineas that 
Thurlow gets a tellership of the Exchequer for his son ; fifty 



177l'-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 415 

guineas that Mademoiselle Ileinel does not dance at the opera- 
house next winter; fifty guineas that two thousand people 
were at the Pantheon last evening ; fifty guineas that Lord 
Ilchester gives his first vote in opposition, and hits eight out 
of his first ten pheasants ; three hundred to fifty from a no- 
bleman who appreciated the privileges of a bachelor that the 
Duke of Devonshire, Lord Cliolmondeley, and two given com- 
moners are married before him ; five guineas down, to receive 
a hnndred if the Duke of Qneensberry dies before half an 
hour after five in the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 
1TT3 ; a hundred guineas on the Duke of Queensberry's life 
against Lord Palmerston's ; a hundred guineas that Lord 
Derby does not see the next general election ; and a hundred 
guineas, between two unusually discreet members of the club, 
that some one in their eye does not live ten years from the 
present date.' The betting was hottest in war time, and dur- 
ing the period while a notorious criminal remained untried or 
unhanged ; for the disciples of George Selwyn were never tired 
of calculating the chances of people dying elsewhere than in 
their beds. The old yellow leaves are scored thick with bets 
that one of the Perreaus would be hanged; that neither of 
them would be hanged, and that Mrs. Rudd would be admitted 
to bail ; that Dr. Dodd would be executed wnthin two months ; 
that he would anticipate the gallows by suicide ; and that if 
he killed himself, it would be by pistol, and not by poison. 
Fitzpatrick, flying at higher game, laid five hundred guineas 
to ten that none of the cabinet were beheaded by that day 
three years ; and another gentleman, who believed the melan- 
choly contingency to be not only possible, but probable, was 
free-spoken enough to name his minister. Still bolder spirits 
did not shrink from placing their money upon proj^hecies 
which the delicacy of a later age has taken effectual care to 

' There is nothing in the book at Brooks's (or, at any rate, notliing 
which has been left unblotted) equal to the wager laid elsewhere by two 
men of family on the snrvivorship of their respective fathers — a wager 
which, as it happened, fate had already decided. Before the news ar- 
rived, the heart of one of the pair failed him, and he bad made over his 
bet to Lord jMarch. 



41 G THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

render illegible; for, indeed, there was no event or experience 
in the whole compass of human existence which March and 
his friends thought it necessarj' to exclude from the field of 
legitimate speculation. It was in allusion to quite the most 
innocent class of these personal and domestic wagers that Lord 
Mountford, when ashed whether his daughter was going to 
present him with a grandchild, replied, " Upon my word, I do 
not know. I have no bet upon it." 

For ten years, from 1771 onwards, Charles Fox betted fre- 
quently, largely, and judiciously on the social and political oc- 
currences of the time. He laid two hundred guineas that 
Lord North would be First Lord of the Treasury in March, 
1773, and twenty guineas that he would still be First Lord in 
March, 1776, " bar death;" a hundred and fifty to fifty that 
the Tea Act was not repealed in the winter session of 1774; 
twenty guineas that Lord Northington, who took more kindly 
to water than his father, did not swim one mile the next time 
he went into the Thames or any other river ; ten guineas down, 
to receive five hundred whenever Turkey in Europe belonged 
to a European power or powers ; and a guinea down, to receive 
fifty " whenever Mr. Croft forgets two by honors in Mr. Fox's 
presence." lie was fond of wagers the settlement of which 
was dependent upon an antecedent condition. " Lord Ossory 
betts Mr. Charles Fox 100 guineas to 10 that Dr. Korth is not 
Bishop of Durhani this day 2 months, provided the present 
Bishop dies within that time." " Mr. E. Foley betts Mr. 
Charles Fox 50 guineas England is at war with France this 
day two years, supposing Louis the Fifteenth dead." And 
Mr. Charles Fox himself bets a hundred guineas against the 
Duke of Devonshire having the Garter within seven years, 
" the Duke to live, or no bet." When the Perreaus were on 
their trial for forgery. Fox was concerned in five bets out of a 
consecutive group of six ; and it is pleasant to remark that, 
even in his hours of sport, the young reformer of the penal 
code was on the side of mercy.' Many -pages together during 

* " The town," said Walpole, with a hit at the patronage wbicli the 
Court so freely bestowed upon Jacobite writers, " is very busy about a 



1 772-7 L] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 417 

ITT-i and 1775 are half covered by his unformed but frank, 
resohite, and most readable handwriting ; and no single name 
appears anything like so often as his, until, at the outbreak of 
the Revolutionary war, under the excitement of the downward 
and upward rush of consols, and of defeats on land alternating 
with victories at sea, Sheridan brought forth from its retire- 
ment the almost neglected volume, and turned it into some- 
thing very like a private betting-book of his own.' But the 
wagers made by Fox are not so suggestive as the wagers made 
about him. The club, wliich was so helpful to him in later 
life, and which is still so faithful to his memory, seems to have 
watched him, from the very first, with a sort of paternal in- 
tentness. " Lord Bolingbroke gives a guinea to Mr. Charles 
Fox, and is to receive a Thousand from him whenever the 
debt of tliis country amounts to 171 millions. Mr. Fox is not 
to pay the 1000 till he is a member of Ilis Majesty's Cabinet." 
" Lord Clermont has given Mr. Crawf urd 10 guineas upon con- 
dition of receiving £500 from him whenever Mr. Charles Fox 
shall be worth £100,000, clear of debts." Such are two among 
those allusions to the opening of his political prospects and 
the waning of his pecuniary fortunes which fill a larger space 
in the records of Brooks's even than prognostications about the 
length of Lord Xorth's first Parliament and the health and 
life of a Certain Great Person. 

Mr. Crawford must have spent his ten guineas with a safe 
conscience. There w\as quite as much likelihood that Great 
Britain would e-row solvent under Lord North and Sandwich 
as that Charles Fox would ever be worth his plum. Brilliant 



history of two Perreaus and a Mrs. Rudd, who are likely to be hanged 
for misapplying their ingenuity. They drew bills, instead of rising from 
the pillory to pensions by coining anecdotes against the author and 
friends of the Revolution." 

' In 1794 Sheridan was responsible for eight bets running, on subjects 
■which varied in importance from tlie question of the French having fail- 
ed or succeeded in occupying Amsterdam to the question of the short- 
est way from one house to another being by Sackville Street or Bond 
Street. Fox entered his last wager in 1795; but for years previously lie 
had almost disused the practice. 

27 



418 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CuAr. X. 

at whist, quinze, and piquet, and almost invariably successful 
in wagers where he backed his knowledge of tlie world or his 
insight into politics, he never could resist the attractions of 
that table where skill could not protect him from the influ- 
ence of his terrible ill-luck ; and he too often matched him- 
self against antagonists who made hazard a game of chance 
only in name. A half -century afterwards, Lord Egremont 
told Lord Holland that mature reflection, aided by enlarged 
experience, had convinced him that the constant and im- 
moderate superiority which certain players maintained over 
Charles Fox and other young men was not to be explained 
by the fortune of the dice ; but if any one, he added, had 
dared to hint such a suspicion at the time, the losers them- 
selves would have torn him in pieces. The highest play ever 
known in London took place during the three years that pre- 
ceded the American war.' Five thousand j)Ounds were staked 
on one card at faro, and seventy thousand pounds changed 
hands in a single evening. Stephen Fox once sat down with 
thirteen thousand pounds, and rose without a farthing ; and 
his brother was quoted daily, in prose and verse, as the type 

' " The young men of quality," wrote Horace Walpole, with reference 
to the year 1772, " had a club at Ahnack's, where they played only for 
rouleaux of fifty pounds each ; and generally there was ten thousand 
pounds in specie on the table. Lord Holland had paid above twenty 
thousand pounds for his two sons. Nor were the manners of the game- 
sters, or even their dresses for play, undeserving of notice. They began 
by pulling ofi" their embroidered clothes, and put on frieze great-coats, or 
turned their coats inside outwards for luck. They put on pieces of leather, 
such as are worn by footmen when they clean the knives, to save their 
laced ruffles; and, to guard their eyes from the light, and to prevent 
tumbling their hair, wore high-crowned hats with broad brims, and 
adorned with flowei's and ribbons." 

The account would be incredible but for a stage direction in Foote's 
" Nabob," which was i^layed in 1773 : " Act the Second. Sir Matthew Mite 
in his gaming dress, a waiter attending." The waiter was a servant at 
one of the clubs, who gave the Nabob lessons in the art of i:)laying with 
style and losing with grace. " Well, Dick," said Sir Matthew at the end 
of the interview, " you will go down to my steward and teach him the 
best method of making a rouleau. And, d'ye hear, let him give you one 
for your pains." 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 419 

of the unlucky gamester. Walpole, enumerating the things in 
the world that were best worth iinding, bracketed together 
the longitude, the philosophers stone, the certificate of the 
Duchess of Kingston's first marriage, the missing books of 
Liv}^, " and all that Charles Fox had lost." And from among 
the countless allusions to the prodigal that occur in the satires 
of the day, it may be permitted to cull a few rhymes, the jo- 
vial ring of which makes amends for their lack of point and 
elegance : 

" At Almack's of pigeons I am told there are flocks, 
But it's thought the completest is one Mr. Fox ; 
If he touches a card, if he rattles the box, 
Away fly the guineas of this Mr. Fox. 
He has met, I'm afraid, with so many hard knocks 
That cash is not plenty with this Mr. Fox. 
In gaming, 'tis said, he's the stoutest of cocks — 
No man can play deeper than this Mr. Fox ; 
And he always must lose, for the strongest of locks 
Cannot keep any money for this Mr. Fox. 
No doubt such beliavior exceedingly shocks 
The friends and acquaintance of this Mr. Fox ; 
And they wish from their souls they could put in tlie stocks, 
And make an example of, this Mr. Fox. 
He's exceedingly curious in coats and in frocks ; 
So the tailor's a pigeon to this Mr. Fox. 
He delights much in hunting, though fat as an ox. 
I pity the horses of this Mr. Fox : 
They are probably most of them lame in the hocks ; 
Such a heavy-made fellow is this Mr. Fox." 

In defiance of nature, which seemed to have modelled him 
for any other class of pursuits, Fox was an ardent, a many- 
sided, and, in some departments, a most accomplished sports- 
man. If it was possible for him to enjoy himself more at one 
time than at another, he was most actively alive to the charms 
of existence when behind his pointers or his spaniels ; and, like 
all men of his temperament, he shot better after advancing 
years had taken off the first edge of his keenness. But he 
did not require a gun to tempt him abroad. He prided him- 
* self on his endurance as a pedestrian, and on the steadiness of 
pace which enabled him almost infallibly to calculate the dis- 



420 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

tance that he traversed by the time that he spent over it. Tlie 
friends of his later life could not please him better than by 
disputing whether this or that village was nine or eleven miles 
from St. Anne's Hill, in order to give him the opportunity of 
solving the problfem by a walk. When a lad at Oxford, he 
trudged the fifty-six miles between Hertford College and Hol- 
land House in the course of a summers da}', and only broke 
the journey for a lunch of bread and cheese and porter, in 
payment for which, observing the usual projjortion between 
the market-value of his pleasures and the price that they cost 
him, he left his gold watch in pawn with the innkeeper. Dur- 
ing a tour in Kerry he swam twice round the Devil's Punch- 
bowl, as if in the West of Ireland he had not enough water 
from overhead.' He was a cricketer ; and would have been 
famous as a batsman if he had taken the game as seriously as 
he took chess and tennis. " My love to Carlisle," he wrote to 
Selwyn from King's Gate in August, 1771 ; " and tell him we 
have a cricket party here, at which I am very near the best 
player; so he may judge of the rest." In and out of his 
ground as freely as if it had been a Lordship of the Ad- 
miralty or the Treasury, it may well be imagined that, in the 
heat of youth, he was an unreliable partner at the wicket. 
When past five-and-fifty, and as much older than his years 
in body as he was younger in all else, he never failed to run 
himself out amidst the reproachful cries of spectators to whom 
it seemed almost a miracle that he could run at all. Trap-ball 
he played in his chair to the very last, and so skilfully as to 
deprive him of all excuse for the barefaced advantages which 
he took over the very small Whigs in whose company he 
was as much at home as ever he had been with their grand- 
fathers. 

The health which he began with was wonderful. A spoonful 
of rhubarb, he cheerfully boasted, cured all the ills to which his 
flesh was heir; although the maladies which his careless but 
laborious mode of life too early brought upon him ere long 



' When he next met Herbert of Muckross in London, " Pray tell me," 
he said, "is that shower at Killarney over yet?" 



1772-7i.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 421 

required sterner remedies. He would gladly have been thin- 
ner. But he was too much of a man to be ashamed of a mis- 
fortune which he did his utmost to correct;' for, in whatever 
pastime he was engaged, he always contrived to get out of it 
the greatest practicable amount of bodily exercise. " When 
his horse ran," we are told, "he was all eagerness and anxiety. 
He placed himself where the animal was to make a push, or 
where the race was to be most strongly contested. From this 
spot he eyed the horses advancing with the most immovable 
look ; he breathed quicker as they accelerated their pace ; and, 
when tliey came opposite to him, he rode in with them at full 
speed, whipping, spurring, and blowing as if he would have 
infused his whole soul into his favorite racer. But when the 
race was over, whether he won or lost seemed to be a matter of 
perfect indifference to him, and he immediately directed his 
conversation to the next race, whether he had a horse to run 
or not." There is a passage in the Chatsworth correspondence 
which, while it apparently alludes to the almost inconceivable 
circumstance of Fox having been in the habit of riding his own 
matches, more probably refers to his vicarious exertions near 
the winning-post. "Mr. Fox returned this morning. He trav- 
elled all night, and yet won one or two races, which, consider- 
ing his not having been abed, and his size, is doing a great 
deal." In 1772 he netted sixteen thousand pounds by laying 
against the favorite, who was beaten by half a neck ; but, as 
the owner of a stable, he did not escape the fate which has so 
often befallen more cautious and less busy men. His own ex- 
planation of his frequent defeats M\as that his horses were as 
good as those of his neighbors, but that they never would gal- 

* Lord Holland's eldest son was fatter than his brother, and minded it 
even less. When a I^ill to abolish the observance of the thirtieth of Jan- 
uary was introduced into the Commons, Stephen Fox raised a laugh by- 
urging that it was very hard to impose abstinence upon the world in 
general, when the descendants of the martyred monarch, to look at them, 
so evidently never fasted. At a fimcy ball in the Pantheon he was fol- 
lowed about by a Smithfield butcher, feeling him in the ribs, and guess- 
ing at his weight in stones, until two very Merry Wives of Windsor 
claimed him as their Falstaff, and fastened themselves upon him for the 
rest of the eveuin?. 



422 THE EAELY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

lop fast enough to tire themselves. Of these prudent animals 
he had at one time thirty in training ; and how fairly he ran 
tliem, and how much he lost by them from first to last, may 
be conjectured from what is known about his racing partner, 
Lord Foley — who, when he gave np the turf, left behind him 
a reputation for honor and good-fellowship which is still a tra- 
dition of the Jockey Club, and a fortune which had once in- 
cluded above a hundred thousand pounds of ready money. 

The world, never tired of gossiping about the young man's 
extravagance, was not in the dark as to the source which fed 
it. "Ask Foley," said Lord Lyttelton, "ask Charles Fox what 
they think of modern infidelity ; and they will tell you that 
the Jews themselves, that -unbelieving race, have deserted the 
standard of scepticism, and, having borne the stigma of spirit- 
ual unbelief for upwards of sixteen hundred years, are at this 
moment groaning beneath the eifects of temporal credulity." 
And, indeed, to an heir-apparent who had experienced the dif- 
ficulties of borrowing on the reversion of a peerage, the all but 
nnlimited credit which Lord Holland's younger son was un- 
fortunate enough to obtain must have appeared nothing less 
than a prodigy. The poets of society attributed his success with 
the money-lenders to those powers of oratorical seduction which 
had so often beguiled the House of Commons into a scrape ; 
and the golden youth of the day spoke with envy of one who 
had at his command 

" Soft words to mollify tlae miser's breast, 
And lull relenting Usury to rest ; 
Bright beams of wit to still the raging Jew, 
Teach him to dun no more and lend anew." 

But it was not the charm of eloquence that drew together 
the crowd of bill-discounters who kicked their heels till three 
in the afternoon in the waiting-room which Charles Fox was 
accustomed to call his Jerusalem Chamber. It was the knowl- 
edge that only one very bad life stood between their client, 
whose own vitality was so unquestionable, and an estate which 
was still among the richest in the kingdom. But even those 
capitalists of St. Mary Axe who counted the years during 
which Lord Holland had manipulated the Exchequer balances, 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 423 

and who had watched Steplieii Fox as lie panted up the steps 
by Avhich the pavement of St. James's Street ascended from 
Pall Mall to Piccadilly, would at length have shaken their 
lieads over the young man's reiterated demands for cash, un- 
less he had brought with him other guarantees than his ex- 
pectations. " The macaronis," wrote AValpole, in July, 1773, 
" are their ne 2)lus ultra. Cliarles Pox is already so like Julius 
Cffisar that he owes a hundred thousand pounds. Lord Car- 
lisle pays fifteen hundred and Mr. Crewe twelve hundred a 
year for him ;" and Walpole underrated the sacrifices that 
Charles Fox's friends had made to an attachment which no 
misconduct on his part could sever, or even strain. 

" A love from me to tliee 
Is firm, wliate'er thou dost," 

was the text for every letter that Lord Carlisle wrote to or 
about Fox from the country-seat which the good-natured 
young peer could not afford to leave, on account of the pecun- 
iary distress in which the improvidence of his comrade had 
involved him. Each fresh instance of prodigality that was 
reported to him from London or Newmarket affected that 
generous heart with anxiety for the character, the health, and 
the happiness of his friend before he found time to compute 
and lament its calamitous infiuence upon his own fortunes. 

" It gives me great pain," he wrote to Selwyn, " to hear that 
Charles Fox begins to be unreasonably impatient at losing. I 
fear it is the prologue to much f retfulness of temper ; for dis- 
appointment in raising money, and serious refiections npon his 
situation, will occasion him many disagreeable moments. They 
will be the more painful when he refiects that he is not fol- 
lowing the natural bent of his genius ; for that would lead him 
to serious inquiry and laudable pursuits. I believe there never 
was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like 
him. His judgments are never w^rong ; his decision is formed 
quicker than any man's I ever conversed with ; and he never 
seems to mistake but in his own affairs. When he tells you 
that he will not talk to you upon his circumstances, he is cer- 
tainly right ; for, if your head is not so much heated with 



424 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

chimerical schemes as his own, or if you arc not prepared to 
hear of enchantment and miracles, you will never enter into 
his manner of reasoning, or derive any comfort from those re- 
sources which he brings into his picture. Adieu, my dear 
George ! I have written a very dull letter. I sometimes am de- 
termined never to think about Charles's affairs, or his conduct 
about them ; for they are like religion — the more one thinks, 
the more one is puzzled." " I hear," he says, later on, " Charles 
cannot go to perform his part at the Winterslow play on ac- 
count of his eyes. I am afraid his eyes are otherwise em- 
ployed. When you see him, pray press him to write to Lord 
Stavordale. If you are serious with him, he must sacrifice two 
minutes and a half to writing, folding up, and sealing. The 
more I live, the more I think I shall alter my way of life very 
essentially for the future. I feel more ambitious here than at 
Al mack's, among a set of people who seem to have none, ex- 
cept Charles, and he seems to have as much in ruining himself 
as in any other pursuit." " Indeed," he urges on a third oc- 
casion, " Charles must take care of himself. He has very bad 
humors which require great attention, or they will make his 
life miserable. As he is so careful in every other part of his 
conduct, he will not be consistent with himself to neglect his 
health. If there should be any change for the better in his 
circumstances. Hare will not lose that opportunity of speaking 
seriously to him about that business. But M'hat he says is 
true. It would be useless to torment him about it when he 
has not a guinea : so there it ends for the present." 

This letter was written in the early spring of 1773 ; and, 
before the year had run out, the crash came. The signal for 
it was the birth of the boy whom Charles Fox loved with 
more than a father's love; the false rumor of whose death 
was the most poignant sorrow that he ever knew ; and who, 
in the absence of children of his own, repaid him in full 
measure that attention and affection in which his parents 
had never found him wanting. The first service which the 
future Lord Holland rendered to his nncle was that of check- 
ing him in his career of senseless profusion. Gibbon has re- 
corded the comment with which the young minister received 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX, 425 

the intcrestinn; tidings. " My brother Ste's son," said Charles, 
" is a second Messiah, born for the destruction of the Jews ;" 
but, as a matter of fact, the happy event proved to be the 
making of his professional and the salvation of his private 
creditors. The flood of unpaid accounts and renewed accept- 
ances which at once poured in from every quarter enlightened 
Lord IloUand on the desperate position into which Charles 
had floundered. Lord Carlisle, most reluctantly obeying his 
bounden duty as a husband and father, laid his claim before 
the parents of his friend in a letter which, if nothing else re- 
mained from his pen, would of itself stamp him as everytliing 
that a true nobleman should be. Lord Holland confronted 
the portentous situation like the man of honor and courage 
which, with all his faults, he was. High or low, exacting or 
considerate, grasping Jew or good Samaritan, no one was a 
penny the worse for having helped and trusted his favorite 
boy. Much was paid on the spot ; much was extinguished by 
annuities which gradually fell in ; and by the time that all 
was clear the Fox property was less by a hundred and forty 
thousand pounds as the consequence of three years of childish 
giddiness and misbehavior, Charles was ready enough to do 
anything that his father would sanction towards alleviating the 
burden which he had imposed upon the family. There are 
symptoms in the book at Brooks's that he Avas not unaffected 
by a touch of the only generous envy — that sense of self-abase- 
ment with which a man who lives upon others regards those 
among his contemporaries who owe everything to their own 
exertions, " Lord Northington betts Mr, Charles Fox 20 guin- 
eas that he (Mr, Fox) is not called to the barr before this time 
four years." " Mr, Burgoyne betts Mr, Charles Fox 50 guin- 
eas that four members of the club are married or dead before 
Charles Fox is called to the bar." But, while he himself had 
got as far as laying money that he would turn his extraordi- 
nary gifts to some remunerative purpose, the public, and per- 
haps his friends, had other and easier schemes for his mainte- 
nance. It was said that he was to marry one of the greatest 
heiresses in the countr}', on the condition that he should never 
lose more than a hundred pounds in one bet or at one sitting. 



426 THE EAKLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

Lord Holland was asked whether the report was true. " I 
earnestly hope so," he replied ; " for then he will be obliged 
to go to bed on at least one night in his life." But even if 
there had been anything in it, the match never came off ; and 
Fox was exposed, fleeced and nnmated,to the compassion of 
the world — " the world " (said Horace Walpole), " which talks 
of Wilkes at the top of the wheel, and of Charles Fox at the 
bottom. All between is a blank." 

Fox was unfortunate in having "Walpole for the chronicler 
of his follies, but not of his achievements. The great memoir- 
writer was daily hearing some fresh story of the doings at Al- 
mack's — which he had full leisure to transcribe and little dis- 
inclination to over-color — while he had no opportunity of see- 
ing the younger man on his best, or at any rate his strongest, 
side; for just as Fox entered Parliament, Horace Walpole 
left it. He had always hated electioneering. To dine M'ith 
two hundred burgesses amidst bumpers, songs, and tobacco ; 
to lead off at the town ball ; " to hear misses play on the harp- 
sichord, and to see an alderman's copies of Rubens and Carlo 
Maratti," were tortures to which nothing would have induced 
him to submit, except a feeling of gratitude towards the con- 
stituency which had stood bravely and faithfully by Sir Kobert 
in the darkest hour of his checkered life.' But five-and-twenty 
years of late nights and bad air and dull speeches at length 
cured Horace Walpole of all desire to remain in a place the 
method of entering which was so shocking to his tastes and 
derano-ins: to his habits : and at the dissolution of 1YC8 he 
did not again court the suffrages of his electors. " Tlie com- 
fort I feel," he wrote from Arlington Street, " in sitting peace- 
ably here, instead of being at Lynn in the high fever of a con- 
tested election, which at best would end in my being carried 

' " My ancient aunt," lie wrote, in 1761, " came over to Lynn to see me. 
The first thing she said to me, although we have not met these sixteen 
years, was, ' Child, you have done a thing to-day that your father never 
did in all his life. You sat as they carried you. He always stood the 
whole time.' ' Madam,' said I, ' when I am placed in a chair, I conclude 
I am to sit in it. Besides, as I cannot imitate my father in great things, 
I am not ambitious of mimicking him in little ones.'" 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 427 

about that large town like a pope at a bonfire, is very great. 
I do not think, when that function is over, that I shall repent 
my resolution. Could I hear oratory beyond my Lord Chat- 
ham's? Will there ever be parts equal to Charles Towns- 
hend's ? Will George Grenville cease to be the most tiresome 
of beings ?" Nor was the sober exultation with, which he threw 
off his political fetters damped by a longer experience of free- 
dom. " Ambition," he told Sir Horace Mann in 1771, " should 
be a passion of youth ; not, as it generally is, of the end of 
life. What joy can it be to govern the grandchildren of our 
contemporaries ? It is but being a more magnificent kind of 
schoolmaster. I was told that 1 should regret quitting my 
seat in Parliament; but I knew myself better than those 
prophets did. Four years are past, and I have done nothing 
but applaud my resolution." He lived in the great world, 
but outside the busy world, contented, tranquil, and occuj)ied; 
concerning himself with the conflict of parties as little as the 
country gentleman who was out with his hounds between the 
armies on the morning of Edgehill ; matching china ; storing 
anecdotes ; keeping the anniversary of the day on which he 
found Count Grammont's miniature; and holding up Straw- 
berry Hill and its owner as the model and example for the 
possessors of lordlier palaces and more turbulent ambitions. 
" Oh ! if my Lord Temple knew what pleasures he could cre- 
ate for himself at Stowe, he would not harass a shattered car- 
cass, and sigh to be insolent at St. James's. For my ]3art, I 
say with the Bastard in " King John " — though with a little 
more reverence, and only as touching his ambition — 

' Oh, old Sir Robert, father, on my knee 
I give Heaven thanks I was not like to thee.' " 

Wiilpole, like a wise man, did not mistake wdiere his happi- 
ness lay. He never wished himself back in the lobbies, and 
still less on the benches of St. Stephen's ; but what he gained 
by his retirement from politics was as nothing to the loss 
which that step inflicted upon the readers of our day and the 
orators of his. It is difficult to say whether Fox and Burke 
would liave profited more in fame, or we in pleasure, if the 



428 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

artist — who at four- and -twenty sketched for lis with such 
vividness and fidelity every changing phase of the Titanic 
party conflict which raged for mouths before and after the 
Christmas of 1741 — had left us a picture of the debates on 
the Middlesex election and the prosecution of the printers, 
painted in the full maturity of his rare and remarkable pow- 
ers. Once, and once only, on the seventh of April, 1772, did 
Walpole show himself again in his ancient haunts. "Though 
I had never," he wrote, " been in the House of Commons since 
I had quitted Parliament, the fame of Charles Fox raised my 
curiosity, and I went this day to hear him. He made his 
motion for leave to bring in a bill to correct the old Marriage 
Bill ; and he introduced it with ease, grace, and clearness, and 
without the prepared and elegant formality of a young speak- 
er. He did not shine particularly; but his sense and facility 
showed that he could shine. Lord North, who had declared 
that he would not oppose the introduction of a new bill, now 
unhandsomely opposed it to please the Yorkes and the Peers, 
and spoke well. Burke made a fine and long oration against 
the motion. He spoke with a choice and variety of language, 
a profusion of metaphors, and yet with a correctness in his 
diction that were surprising. His fault was copiousness above 
measure, and he dealt abundantly too much in establishing 
general positions. Charles Fox, who had been running about 
the House talking to different persons, and scarce listening to 
Burke, rose with amazing spirit and memory ; answered both 
Lord North and Burke ; ridiculed the arguments of the for- 
mer, and confuted those of the latter, with a shrewdness that 
as much exceeded that of his father, in embracing all the ar- 
guments of his antagonists, as he did in his manner and deliv- 
ery. Lord Holland was always confused before he could clear 
up the point ; fluttered and hesitated ; wanted diction ; and 
labored only one forcible conclusion. Charles Fox had great 
facility. His words flowed rapidly; but he had nothing of 
Burke's variety of language or correctness, nor his method. 
Yet his arguments were far more shrewd. Burke was inde- 
fatigable, learned, and versed in every branch of eloquence. 
Fox was dissipated, dissolute, idle beyond measure. He was 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 429 

that very morning returned from Newmarket, where he had 
lost some thousand pounds the preceding day. He had stop- 
ped at Ilockerel, where he found company ; had sat up drink- 
ing all night ; and had not been in bed when lie came to move 
his bill, which he had not even drawn up. This was genius 
— was almost inspiration. The House dividing. Lord North 
M'as beaten by sixty-two to sixty-one — a disgraceful event for 
a prime-minister." 

The result must have satisfied Fox, who held the only true 
crown of rhetoric to be a good division. He was no holiday 
declaimer. His eloquence, like that of Sir Eobert Walpole, 
" was for use, and not for show." There probably never was 
such a famous and attractive orator who gave so much care 
to the substance of his discourse, and so little to the trappings. 
His speaking, like that of all men who can speak to any pur- 
pose, w^as the full and exact expression of his true self. " I 
do not believe it, sir," said Johnson to a critic who opined that 
Burke was of the school of Cicero. " Burke has great knowl- 
edge, great fluency of words, and great promptness of ideas, 
so as to speak with great illustration on any subject that comes 
before him. He does not speak like Cicero or like Demos- 
thenes. He speaks as well as he can." And in like manner 
Fox charmed and moved and persuaded because liis oratory 
was the faithful reflection of his ardent and sagacious nature. 
"Mr. Pitt," Porson used to say, "conceives his sentences be- 
fore he utters them. Mr. Fox throws himself into the middle 
of his, and leaves it to God Almighty to get him out again." 
"Pitt," said Fox, "is never at a loss for the word, and I am 
never at a loss for a word," and (he might have added) for 
an idea. Circling round and about the point, but never leav- 
ing it; composing at the moment, and for the moment, and, 
as he laughingly confessed, forgetting every line of every 
speech which he had ever uttered ; bringing out a thought or 
a circumstance the very instant that it occurred to him with 
the certainty that, in the impetuous rush of his declamation, 
he never would recover it again if he once allowed it to fall 
for half a minute into the rear — he almost seemed as if, in 
the words of Sterne, he was catching the ideas which Heaven 



430 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

intended for another man. He repeated himself freely, fre- 
quently, and emphatically ; obeying, as he declared, his theory 
of the art, but more probably acting on the instinct of the 
orator, who will never leave his hearers alone until he has 
talked them over. And how willingly those hearers, at every 
period of his life, submitted themselves to the process of liav- 
inof the hard facts and clinching arguments in which he dealt 
dinned and pounded into their ears is evident from allusions 
which lie thick in every corner of the literature of his epoch. 
At one-and-twenty he had already been dubbed " the flower 
of oratory " by a poet far too thick-witted to do anything but 
reproduce the accepted judgment of the world ; and in 1780 
an acute and impartial observer bore witness how little he 
had wearied Parliament by ten years of perpetual speaking. 
A Prussian clergyman who had the courage to walk on foot 
through a country the inhabitants of which in those days 
treated nobody so badly as a foreigner, except a pedestrian, 
came in the course of his arduous journey to London, and 
went forthwith to see Fox in the House of Commons. " It 
is impossible for me," he writes, " to describe with what fire 
and persuasion he spoke, and how the Speaker in the chair 
incessantly nodded approbation from beneath his solemn wig, 
and innumerable voices incessantly called out ' Hear him ! 
hear him !' And when there was the least sign that he in- 
tended to leave off speaking, they no less vociferously ex- 
claimed, ' Go on !' and he continued to speak in this manner 
for nearly two hours." 

So it was at the outset, and so it continued to the end. 
But, although his brother-senators heard him more and more 
willingly as years went on. Fox never turned so man}'- votes 
as during his first half-dozen sessions, when party limits were 
still undefined, and party obligations far less strict than they 
afterwards became. "It is very well worth while," said 
Burke, in 1776, " for a man to take pains to speak well in 
Parliament. The House of Commons is a mixed body. It is 
by no means pure ; but neither is it wholly corrupt, though 
there is a large proportion of corruption in it. There are many 
members who generally go with the minister, but who will 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 431 

not go all lengths. There are many honest well-meaning conn- 
try gentlemen who are in Parliament only to keep up the con- 
sequence of their families, and upon most of these a good 
speech will have influence." ' Such people were open to con- 
viction, but they preferred to be convinced by one of their 
own order. How closely allied was the feeling in Parliament 
to the tone of society, every list of the House, and, still more, 
every list of the Whig minority, shows. Lascelleses and 
Townshends and Damers and Keppels and Cavendishes 
come almost as thick as Camjjbells and Macphersons on the 
old regimental rolls of the East India Company. Lord Hard- 
wicke had four of his sons in the Commons together. Lord 
Hertford was a disappointed man because he conld only seat 
live of his. Bnt while ready to welcome any number of a fam- 
ily which they recognized, the well-born jDoliticians of 1770 
knew the secret of making public life uncomfortable to the 
vulgar herd; and their less fastidious descendants must ac- 
knowledge with awe that they drew the line of demarcation 
very high. A report that Sir Joshua Reynolds was to stand 
for Plympton excited the mirthful resentment of fashionable 
London to a height which encouraged Selwyn to punish the 
offender with the most obvious of all his jokes.^ And when 
Selwyn himself was threatened by an influential timber-mer- 
chant with an opposition in his own borough, the indignation 
and contempt of St. James's Street passed the very utmost 
bounds of decency. "My dear George," wrote Gilly Will- 
iams, " I am heartily sorry that this damned carpenter has 
made matters so serious with you." " What can a man mean," 
asked Lord Carlisle, " who has not an idea separated from the 
foot-square of a Norway deal plank, by desiring to be in Par- 

' Bishop Watson lias preserved the analysis of a division on a question 
where the views of the court were on one side and the interests of the na- 
tion on the other. The Cornish boroughs furnished twenty-seven members 
to the majority which voted with the ministers; the Cinque Ports, thir- 
teen ; and all the counties of England and AVales together, only twelve. 

" " He is not to be laughed at," said Selwyn. " He may very well suc- 
ceed in being elected; for Sir Joshua is the ablest man I know on a can- 
vass." 



432 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

liament ? Perhaps if you could have got anybody to ask his 
reasons for such an unnatural attemjDt, the fact of his being 
unable to answer what he had never thought about would 
have made him desist. But these beasts are monstrously ob- 
stinate, and about as well-bred as the great dogs they keep in" 
their yards. 1 hope to hear soon that you have chained this 
animal and prevented him from doing you much harm." 

Gibbon (who, as a needy squire seeking to mend his fortune 
by politics, was at once admitted within the pale) found the 
Commons "a very agreeable coffee-house," with this advan- 
tage over the Lords, that its frequenters could go there in un- 
dress. Kigby, indeed, always appeared on the Treasury bench 
in a court suit of purple cloth, "• with his sword thrust through 
the pocket;" but the great body of the members pursued their 
business with that disregard of ceremony which, as compared 
to people of his class in other countries, has long been a dis- 
tinguishing mark of the English gentleman. " They come into 
the House," wrote the German pastor who has been quoted 
above, " in their great-coats, and with boots and spurs. It is 
not at all uncommon to see a member lying stretched out on 
one of the benches while others are speaking. Some crack 
nuts ; others eat oranges, or whatever else is in season. There 
is no end to their going in and out ; and as any one wishes to 
go out he places himself before the Speaker and makes his 
bow like a schoolboy asking his tutor's permission." Meeting 
just as the first touch of winter suggests to mankind the wis- 
dom of getting together in cities to keep one another warm, 
breaking off in December for a month's hunting at some great 
nobleman's seat in the home counties, and finally disj)ersing 
to their country-houses in time for the last of the lilacs and 
the laburnums, the members of George the Third's second 
Parliament had little to complain of.' That easy-going assem- 

' Fox's first Parliament was up in May four years out of the six. Offi- 
cial people grumbled -uofuUy because the Birthday kept them in town 
till after the fourth of June. And yet Burke found it no easy matter to 
get his flock to London, even for so short a session. "I would wish," 
wrote the Duke of Richmond to him from Goodwood in November, 1773, 
"not to stir from hence till after Christmas, as I have engaged a large 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 433 

bly, in its diameter of an aristocratic debating society, at once 
acknowledged Charles Fox as its hero ; and in its social capac- 
ity it almost as soon accepted him as a favorite. The greatest 
master of the art of reply that Parliament ever saw, his col- 
leagues all but nnanimonsly pronounced him the best fellow 
that ever lived. The qualities by which he acquired that rep- 
utation are pleasantly indicated in an undated letter, probably 
of the year 1T72, from his friend Crawford — who was a man 
of parts and vivacitj^ but too self-absorbed and affected ever 
to have made a successful politician. " You will be delighted," 
this gentleman wrote to Stephen Fox, " to hear that I had the 
misfortune to speak a few days ago in the House of Com- 
mons. If I was the oldest and dearest friend you had in the 
world, you could not have wished me to succeed worse than I 
did. It was a prepared speech ; ill-timed, ill received, ill de- 
livered, languid, plaintive, and everything as bad as possible. 
Add to all this that it was very long ; because, being pom- 
pously begun, I did not know how the devil to get out of it. 
The only thing I said which was sensible or to the purpose 
was misrepresented by Burke. Charles was not ashamed to 
acknowledge me in my distress. He explained and defended 
■what I had said with spirit, warmth, and great kindness to me. 
I am really more pleased at receiving a proof of kindness from 
Charles, whom I admire and love more and more every day, 
than I am hurt at not succeeding in a thing in which I had no 
right to succeed." Such was an early sample of the generous 
acts and genial words by which through thirty years of hope- 
less opposition Fox recompensed the services of the trust}^ 
body-guard who never deserted him for all that king or min- 
ister had to give. " I am much of opinion," wrote Lord Bath- 
iirst to Lady Suffolk when Walpole was in power, " that a cer- 

party to come liere on the first of December and stay a month to fox- 
hunt." " To act with any sort of eftect," so Burke urged on Lord Rock- 
ingham, " the principal of your friends ought to be called to town a full 
week before the meeting. Lord John ought not to be allowed to jilead any 
sort of excuse. He ought to be allowed a certain decent and reasonable 
portion of fox-hunting to put him in wind for the parliamentary race he 
is to run ; but anything more is intolerable." 

28 



434 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

tain man, who lias now by far the greatest levees of any sub- 
ject in England, M'ould find it ditiicnlt, after laying down his 
post, to make np a party at quadrille if he resolved to play 
only with three personal friends." Very different was the 
compliment paid to the Whigs, both leader and followers, at 
the most desperate, but in the eyes of every true member of 
the party the most memorable, period of their historj^ 
" There are only forty of them," it was said in 1794 ; " but 
every man of them would be hanged for Fox." * 

People who in February, 17T2, were told that Lord ]S"orth 
had lost a subordinate, at once took it for granted that Lord 
Rockingham had gained, a follower. " Charles Fox," wu'ote 
Gibbon, " is commenced patriot, and is already attempting to 
pronounce the words 'country,' 'liberty,' 'corruption,'' with 
what success time will discover." But when he assured Lord 
Ossory that he was safe from the danger of going into opposi- 
tion, Fox knew himself better than did any of liis critics. His 
conduct during the spring and winter sessions of 1772 was the 
model for a young politician who has left the ministry on a 
point of conscience. After he had liberated his soul about the 
question, or rather the group of questions, Avhich had banished 
him from office, he preserved a modest silence ; interfering 

^ What Fox must have been for Adam and Fitzpatrick, for Lord Der- 
by, Lord John Townshend, and Lord Lauderdale may be judged from his 
behavior towards people whom he did not even know by name. When 
Pitt was doubtful about a face, he would look hard at its possessor until 
he came within speaking distance, and then would look uneasily away ; 
but Fox nodded to everybody who appeared to recognize him, 'or whom 
he fancied that he had seen before. The parish schoolmaster of Clapham 
— a strong Tory, as may well be supposed — ^went to the House of Com- 
mons to hear a debate, but could not make his way inside. A stout mem- 
ber who happened to be passing perceived that he was in difficulties ; 
rescued him from the tyranny of the doorkeepers; carried him into the 
gallery; pointed out Dundas, Whitbread, and Sheridan; and answered 
all his questions about the business of the day. After a while the Speak- 
er named Mr. Fox, and the awe-struck visitor beheld his protector rise 
from his seat and commence a furious attack upon the ministry. The 
young people at Clapham, among whom the man was something of an 
oracle, noticed that he never said a word against Fox from that time 
forward. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 435 

mildly and briefly on matters relating; to the department in 
which he had served before his retirenjent. But he had given 
the ministers too marked a sample of his quality in the de- 
bates on the Marriage Bill for them to delude themselves into 
the belief that he would be content to sit forever among the 
army contractors and retired Anglo-Indians below the gang- 
way, helping his former colleagues when they were in a difli- 
culty over their Navy estimates, and telling for them in a di- 
vision when a Treasury whip happened to be away at his din- 
ner. North trusted him as the man in the storj^ trusted the 
leopard's cub which had tasted his blood ; and since Charles 
Fox could not be shot, there was nothing for it but to muzzle 
him with all despatch. The year which commenced with his 
resignation ended with a reconstruction of the government 
devised for the sole object of recovering his services and in- 
suring the ministry against his possible hostility. A king's 
friend was thrust up-stairs into an Irish vice-treasiirership ; a 
nobleman who had been a friend of Lord Chatham was thrust 
down-stairs, and a large bag of public money flung after him ; 
and. the chair at the Treasury table, which had been emptied 
with so little ceremony towards individuals and at so great an 
expense to the taxpayer, was respectfully offered to Fox. The 
salary, poor for those days, did not amount to half of-the thir- 
ty-five hundred a year which was paid to a Vice-treasurer of 
Ireland for living idle in London ; but Charles had set his af- 
fections upon a post where he could learn the work and enti- 
tle himself to the reversion of the Chancellorship of the Ex- 
chequer. Fame he regarded as a prize more enticing, and 
certainly in his case less evanescent, than money. His father 
was supremely contented at seeing him once more settled in 
life ; and the delight of the old peer was reflected in the let- 
ters of his correspondents. "I am much obliged," wrote a 
trusty friend of the family, "by your kindness in acquainting 
me of the arrangement made in favor of Charles. I congrat- 
ulate you and Lady Holland upon it most sincerely, as I am 
persuaded that this event will be attended by many circmn- 
stances which must give you both pleasure. I make no doubt 
that his present position will soon make a great change in 



436 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X, 

other tilings, much to your satisfaction and my most ardent 
wishes." 

The prediction was kindly meant and speedily falsified. It 
needed more than the possession of a small place and the hope 
of a great one to effect a radical change in the nature of 
Charles Fox. At whatever Board he might have been doing 
business in the daytime, when evening came he appeared in 
the House of Commons as headstrong, as unbridled, as impul- 
sive as ever. In the historical debates of May, 1773 — when 
the House of Commons first gravely and sedately condemned 
the rapacity of Lord Clive, and then balanced the accounts of 
patriotism and morality by putting on record its gratitude for 
his great and meritorious services to the country — Fox furi- 
ously declaimed against the conqueror of India as " the origin 
of all plunder, and the source of all robbery." His impetu- 
osity, which arose from feelings honorable to him as a man, 
was not inconsistent with his obligations as an official; for 
the matter at issue was admittedly an open question, where 
the king differed from the prime-minister, while the attorney- 
general led for the attack, and the solicitor- general for the 
defence. But in the subsequent month, when the contro- 
versy was over and done with, and the glorious criminal had 
been censured, thanked, and pardoned — when Parliament had 
agreed to condone the past, and, intent ujDon securing Hin- 
dostan from oppression in the future, was calmly engaged 
upon the details of a bill for the better government of our 
Eastern dependencies — Fox interpolated in the discussion an 
invective hurled straight into Clive's face with such pointed 
and unsparing vehemence that the audience seemed to recog- 
nize an imitation of the apostrophe to Catiline in the mouth 
of a speaker who had too much of his own to borrow from 
any one. It does not require a Sallust to depict the conster- 
nation with which Lord I^orth, the year before a general elec- 
tion, saw the most powerful Commoner in England, with ten 
votes in his pocket,' making his exit from the House in an 

' " We sliall come very strong into Parliament," -wrote Clive, in 1768; 
" seven witliout opposition, and probably one more. Lord Clive, Shrews- 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 437 

agony of rai2:e and shame beneath tlic withering rhetoric of a 
Commissioner of the Treasury. 

As long as the ministry was responsible for the proceedings 
of one who viewed his fellow -creatures in the light of so 
many subjects for a philippic, it was never likely to want 
enemies either in Parliament or without it. At the end of 
the first month of the session of 1774, Charles Fox detected 
in the corner of his newspaper a letter, purporting to be writ- 
ten by " A South Briton," which traced back the prevailing 
corruption and immorality of the age to the date of the re- 
bellion against James the Second. He pounced upon the op- 
portunity of reviving the laurels that he had won, and pos- 
sibly of obtaining the crown of martyrdom that he so narrow- 
ly missed, in the course of that broil between the House of 
Commons and the printers, to which he still looked back as 
the most enlivening fortnight of his existence. So seductive 
was his tongue, and so inveterate the senatorial habit of re- 
garding the daily press as a criminal organization, that he 
actually persuaded the collective wisdom of the country to 
pass a resolution ordering the attorney -general to proceed 
against the author and publishers of a performance which 
M-as as absolutely unexceptionable as it was detestably dull, 
on the farcical plea that it was a libel " on the era of the glori- 
ous Revolution." But, before the debate was concluded. Fox 
revealed a glimpse of that better self which was never out of 
sight for many hours together. Mr. Thomas Townshend, with 
so'ine reason, but more ill-nature, taunted the government with 
their inconsistency in prosecuting an anonymous scribbler— 
who, in the poverty of his intellect and a temporary dearth 
of gossip, had earned a dinner by lampooning the Whigs of 
1688 — when they had pensioned notorious and virulent Jac- 
obites like Dr. Shebbeare and Dr. Johnson. Fox, who was 

bury; Ricliard Clive, Montgomery; William and George Clive, Bishop's 
Castle; John Walsh, Worcester; Henry Strachey, Poutefract; and Ed- 
mund Maskelyne, probably either for Whitechurch or Cricklade." "He 
has terminated at fifty," said Horace Walpole, in November, 1774, " a life 
of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation. He had just 
named ten members for the new Parliament." 



438 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

just then in the first flush of pride and satisfaction at the 
privilege of being admitted to dine twice a month with John- 
sbn/ and who would as soon have tliought of sitting at table 
with Shebbeare as of standing by him on tlie pillory, rose in- 
dignantly to protest against the unfairness of publicly coup- 
ling two such names in the same indictment. " I should," he 
went on to say, " be very much against persecuting a man of 
great literary abilities for any opinions which he may happen 
to drop in works not professedly political. It would be very 
far from encouraging literature, which is ever best encouraged 
in a free government." The sentiment was just ; though it 
could be reconciled with the proposal which was before the 
House only on the theory that any one who attacked the 
government in print must expect to be punished unless he 
could bring evidence that he was a great writer. But the 
generous warmth of the young man redeemed the inconse- 
quence of his arguments. Three years before, in the debates 
on the arrest of the printers, Townshend had made an attack 
upon Johnson and his pension precisely similar to that by 
which he had on this occasion indulged his spleen ; and Wed- 
derburn had replied with a pointed and elaborate panegyric 
upon the author of the. "Dictionary" and the "Kambler," 
which might be supposed to have been more gratifying to the 
object of it than the brief and general terms in which Fox 
paid his tribute to literature. Wedderburn left the Whigs 
for the Tories, and Fox the Tories for the Whigs ; but their 
common client, the most famous Tory outside Parliament be- 
tween Swift and Scott, would never allow party spirit to mod- 
ify the very different measure of respect which he entertained 

* The Club was formed early in 1764. "After about ten years," said 
Boswell, " instead of supping weekly, it was resolved to dine together 
once a fortnight during the meeting of Parliament." Fox was elected 
in the spring of 1774, and made the best of listeners. Johnson was much 
exercised by his not taking his share of the talk, and charged him with 
not caring to row unless, as in the House of Commons, he pulled first oars. 
But Fox knew what a treat he was enjoying; and his silence was the 
measure of his respect for a company whose names would be remember- 
ed when three fourths of the cabinet had been forgotten. 



1772-74.] CIIAKLES JAMES FOX. 439 

for liis two defenders. Towards Lord Longliborongli he ob- 
served a cold neutrality, which all who knew their man rec- 
ognized as the thin veil of profound contempt; while for 
Fox he cherished a lively and willing gratitude, which grew 
all the firmer as the political gulf between them was agitated 
by fiercer and ever fiercer tempests. The heartiest expression 
of his gratitude and regard was uttered in the very throes of 
the mortal duel that sent to the wall for half the century the 
principles which Fox represented and which Johnson nuide 
it his duty to hate. "I am for the king against Fox," he 
would say to those who asked him how he was atfected tow- 
ards the Coalition Ministry ; " but I am for Fox against Pitt. 
The king is my master, but Fox is my friend." 

At no time would the ministers have liked their j'oung col- 
league the better for thrusting them into a quarrel with the 
newspapers; but in February, 1774, they were less inclined 
than ever to rejoice at having upon their hands another 
Wheble, and possibly another Wilkes. The House of Com- 
mons was already deep in a mess which Charles Fox had been 
the most active in stirring, though it was originally com- 
pounded by one who was almost as troublesome to sober and 
unwarlike people as himself. All London was talking of a 
man whose fame as a politician is now dim almost to extinc- 
tion, and who, as a writer on philology, has shared the fate 
of specialists who start upon their discoveries before science 
has ascertained what is the necessary outfit for an explorer. 
But John Home had a great and varied reputation while he 
lived, and long enough afterw^ards to be honored w^ith the 
most florid, and far from the least amusing, of those biogra- 
phies of sixty years ago, which were adulatory, but never un- 
candid ; absurd, but never dull. There we learn that though, 
like Pericles, he rarely laughed, like Alcibiades he could suit 
himself to the humors of other men ; that he could enjoy his 
wune with Homer and Ennius, could draw a character with 
Tacitus, and was as ready to accept money from his friends 
as Pliny and Cicero ; that during his career he was as artful 
in counsel as Ulysses, as cool in action as the Duke of Marl- 
borough, and as self-confident as Michael Angelo ; and that, 



440 THE EARLY IIISTOIIY OF [Chap. X. 

when the end came, he was as ready to die, and as desirons to 
have a simple funeral, as Titns Pomponius Atticus.' But, in 
truth, his character and powers were not of the heroic order ; 
and the people who had parallel histories and similar disposi- 
tions with Home were to be found in his own country and 
his own half-century. He was the earliest, and for practical 
business by far the ablest, of a class of men to whom English- 
men owe a debt of gratitude which they are, not inexcnsably, 
somewhat unwilling to acknowledge. Among the most la- 
mentable results of a system of coercion and repression is the 
deteriorating effect which it produces upon those who brave 
it. When to speak or write one's mind on politics is to ob- 
tain the reputation, and render one's self liable to the punish- 
ment, of a criminal, social discredit, with all its attendant 
moral dangers, soon attaches itself to the more humble oppo- 
nents of a ministry. To be outside the law as a publisher or 
a pamphleteer is only less trying to conscience and conduct 
than to be outside the law as a smuggler or a poacher; and 
those who, ninety years ago, placed themselves within the 
grasp of the penal statutes as they were administered in Eng- 
land and barbarously perverted in Scotland were certain to 
be very bold men, and pretty sure to be unconventional up to 
the uttermost verge of respectability. As an Italian Liberal 
was sometimes half a bravo, and a Spanish patriot often more 
than half a brigand, so a British Radical under George the 
Third had generally, it must be confessed, a dash of the Bo- 
hemian. Such, in a more or less mitigated form, were Paine 
and Cobbett, Hunt, Hone, and llolcroft ; while the same 
causes in part account for the elfish vagaries of Shelley and 
the grim improprieties of Godwin. But when we recollect 
how these, and the like of these, gave up every hope of world- 
ly prosperity, and set their life and liberty in continual hazard 
for the sake of that personal and political freedom which we 
now exercise as miconsciously as we breathe the air, it would 

* The only ^vortlly ■ohom we are distinctly told he did not rcscml-)lc 
was Jolm Wesley, who held, as did not Home, " that without flvsting and 
early rising it is impossiljle to grow in grace." 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAIMES FOX. 441 

be too exacting to require that each and all of them should 
have lived as decorously as Perceval, and died as solvent as 
Bishop Toniline, 

At the coniniencenieiit of 1774, Hornets fortunes, which sel- 
dom were overflowing, had come to their lowest ebb. Honest, 
impracticable, insatiably contentious, and inordinately vain, 
he had thrown away almost all his chances and his friends.' 
He had lately cpiitted tlie Church (which he entered as a youth 
under strong instigation from his father), and had exchanged 
the vicarage of Brentford for a cottage where he was study- 
ing jurisprudence in the vain hope that the benchers of the 
Inner Temple would admit him to the bar. Sanguine, indeed, 
must he have been to spend six years of such industry as his 
on tlie labor of preparing himself for a profession the gate 
to which was easily defended by the members of the most 
jealous of guilds against an interloper M'ho had no partisans 
at his back to help him in forcing an entrance; for, as his 
biographer expressly states, Home was at this period " one of 
the most odious men in the kingdom." The same peculiari- 
ties of temper which in after-years brought him into violent 
and simultaneous hostility w4tli both Pitt and Fox had now 
landed him in the singular position that he was reading law 
with the object of worrying Mansfield, and writing reams of 
correspondence filled with small-minded and grandly phrased 
abuse of Wilkes. The pair of patriots had abundance of 
mutual secrets connected with the monej'-lender, the vintner, 
the horse-dealer, and even the old-clothes man, which Home 
did not scruple to unpack and display before the eyes of a 
laughing public ; and Wilkes retaliated by extracting, from 
the parson of Brentford's letter of January, 1776, that sen- 
tence which, unluckily for its author, is the only passage in 
his works that any living man, except a lecturer on etymology, 
can re^^eat by heart. And while everybody with leisure for 
such a problem was discussing whether it was worse to apol- 



^ "You," said John Ilonie to his brotlier Benjamin, the most prosper- 
ous market-gardener of the day, " have risen by your gravity, while I 
have sunk by my levity." 



442 THE EARLY IIISTOllY OF [Chap. X. 

ogize for having submitted to " the infectious hand of a 
bishop " or to have shirked paying for three chintz dressing- 
gowns and twenty -five bottles of old Jamaica rum, Junius 
infused a spark of common-sense and high feeling into the ig- 
noble altercation by reminding Ilorne tliat the AVilkes whom 
he formerly worshipped was the same man as the Wilkes 
whom he now reviled, and that the sincere friend of a great 
cause should find some other means to evince his love for it 
than by gloating over the frailties of its most prominent ad- 
vocate. 

Home's wayward and haughty spirit was shocked, but not 
tamed, by a sense of his isolation. The only reward, he feel- 
ingly complained, of all his labors and sacrifices was that tlie 
multitude, for whom he worked and suffered, had not yet torn 
him in pieces. But depression, in masculine natures, stops 
short at the point where it is sinking into despair, and recoils 
towards alert and courageous action. Ilorne was in a mind to 
shrink from nothing which would enable him to regain his 
ground in the race for j^opularity ; and he soon had the field 
clear for a fresh start. Wilkes — who had been dragged into 
print sorely against his will, and had written only one letter 
for every two, and hardly one page for every four, of his ad- 
versary's — had withdrawn from the controversy with a Par- 
thian fling at Home's treachery and a flourish about his own 
sorrows and services.* Junius, having signed his redoubted 
pseudonym for the last time, was making his preparations (a 
much longer and heavier business then than now) for a jour- 
ney to the distant shore where he was to fight unmasked and 
breast to breast with an antagonist of sterner mettle than any 

^ "Whether you proceed, sir, to a, thirteenth or a, thirtieth letter is to 
me a matter of the most entire indifference. You "VN-ill no longer have me 
your correspondent. All the efforts of your malice and rancor cannot give 
me a moment's disquietude. Formerly, in exile, when I was rn'le patrid- 
que extorris, I have moistened my bread with tears. Tlie rest of my life 
I hope to enjoy my morsel at home in peace and cheerfulness, among 
those I love and honor, far from the malignant eye of the false friend and 
the invidious hypocrite." The thirteenth letter was duly sent and never 
answered. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 443 

who had gone fortli against him either from Brentford or St. 
James's. As early as June, 1773, his Majesty, little aware of 
the hidden truth with which his words were weighted, had in- 
formed Lord North that, though he knew nothing of the other 
gentlemen who applied to be appointed on the Council of 
Bengal, he could vouch for Mr. Francis being a man of tal- 
ents. Witli. no competitor left to outbid him, and no censor 
to rebuke him. Home lay vigilantly in wait for an opportunity 
of recovering caste in his old party ; and while Charles Fox 
remained in the government there was small probability that 
he would have to wait in vain. 

Mr. AVilliam Tooke, of Purley, in Surrey, and a landed pro- 
prietor in the East of England, had been a Wilkite up to the 
time when it became necessary to choose between Ilorne and 
Wilkes. Tooke had long been in litigation over a disputed 
right of enclosure with his country neighbor, Mr. Thomas De 
Grey, the member for Norfolk. The contention ran its usual 
course. De Gre}^, as lord of the manor, erected a fence ; and 
Tooke, who was a commoner, pulled it down. Then came an 
action for trespass and a challenge to fight from the one side, 
answered by a citation before the King's Bench from the 
other ; until De Grey, who held that the law's delay was not 
intended for members of Parliament, got one of his colleagues 
to introduce into the Commons a private bill which gave him 
all he wanted. Tooke had nobody to speak for him in the 
House but Aldermen Sawbridge and Townshend; and such 
advocates, as he well knew, would do his cause more harm 
than profit in a contest with the brother of Lord North's ex- 
attorney-general. He turned for advice to Home, Avho at once 
saw his chance of making himself into a political martyr, and 
at the same time of serving the interests of as good a friend 
as ever fell to the lot of one who was seldom anything but his 
own enemy. 

A petition to Parliament was presented from De Grey, and 
a counter-petition from Tooke ; and they were duly dealt with 
by the Speaker in the expeditious and rather slovenly manner 
in which nineteen twentieths of the enormous mass of private 
business that falls upon the House of Commons must necessa- 



444 THE EAJILY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

rily be done, if it is to be done at all. The astonishment of 
every one who had been present on this very uninteresting oc- 
casion was great when in the Public Advertiser of the eleventh 
of February there appeared a letter, columns long, imputing 
to Sir Fletcher Norton deliberate and corrupt partiality, and 
charging him in so many words with falsehood, intentional 
chicane, and premeditated knavery. The members of that 
Parliament allowed themselves extraordinary liberties with 
their Speaker;' but they had no idea of extending those lib- 
erties to the world outside. And yet, when the letter in the 
Advertiser was brought before the notice of the Plouse, some 
among the milder spirits, weary of the very mention of Priv- 
ilege, entreated that Sir Fletcher Noi'ton should cany his case 
to the ordinary courts, wliicli were open to him as nuicli as to 
any other citizen. But Charles Fox struck in with a clever 
and well-timed speech which summarily extinguished that 
pusillanimous suggestion. Was the House of Commons (he 
asked), M'ith its undoubted and unbounded judicial authority, 
to implore an inferior tribunal for protection ? The King's 
Bench would never humiliate itself by appealing for redress 
and defence to the Common Pleas ; and what the King's 
Bench, in majesty and strength, was to the Common Pleas, 
that, and much more, was the House of Commons to the 
King's Bench. It was unanimously resolved that Woodfall, 
the publisher of the PiMic Advertiser, should be ordered to 
the bar. Woodfall obe3"ed the summons, and with sorrowful 
protestations of regret for his share in the transaction, indicat- 
ed Home as the writer of the libel. Having got the name of 

^ A month after Norton had been chosen Speaker, Sir William Mere- 
dith complained that he had been " traduced" from the Chair. Dowdes- 
well moved a resolution to the effect that Mr. Speaker's words were con- 
trary to precedent and iDropriety. "Two pillars," said Captain Phipps, 
" should supjiort that Chair, experiende and impartiality. Experience, 
sir, you tell us that you have not" — and here a hasty call to order provid- 
ed the gallant officer with the oratorical effect at which he was aiming. 
Burke,while writing a petition at the bar, quoted " Hamlet " at the Speaker 
along the whole length of the House; and when he made his celebrated 
allusion to Junius, the best-turned phrase amidst that inextricable tangle 
of gorgeous metaphors is the allusion to Sir Fletcher's eyebrows. 



1772-74.] CHAKLES JAMES FOX. 445 

the principal, the more reasonable men of both parties were 
inclined to let the accessory go ; but Fox, relieving Thnrlow 
and Wedderbnru of their functions as legal advisers of the 
House of Commons, and North of his responsibility as its 
leader, and making at least one speech for every fresh char- 
acter whicli he assumed, succeeded in committing the govern- 
ment to a proposal that Woodfall should be confined in the 
gate-house of Westminster. Dowdeswell, however, pointed out 
that all the precedents were in favor of the House intrusting 
its prisoner to the charge of its own sergeant-at-arms ; not to 
mention the extreme unlikelihood that a publisher would ever 
again turn evidence against his authors, if he was to be re- 
warded for his information by being sent to lie in the common 
jail. Lord Xorth, who was watching the debate with eyes 
that he never ventured to close for five minutes together 
while he had Fox for a colleague, perceived that Dowdeswell 
had convinced the House, and, with an awkward playfulness 
which rendered his vexation all the more aj)parent, entreated 
the executioner who had bound him to the stake to give him 
back his liberty of action. But Fox was inexorable ; and the 
prime-minister, driven to vote for a course Mdiicli he disap- 
proved by a subordinate whom he was beginning cordially to 
detest, begged his friends to divide against him, and thankful- 
ly accepted the humiliation of being beaten on a motion of his 
own introducing by a majority of more than two to one. 

As soon as Woodfall had been disposed of, an order was 
made out directing the Reverend John Home to attend on 
the sixteenth of February. The day came, and the House was 
crowded, as it always will be crowded when any folly is on 
foot ; but in place of Home himself, there came a civil letter 
in which he informed the Commons that he should be very 
glad to wait upon them if they would be good enough to ab- 
stain from addressing him by a title which he no longer recog- 
nized. Lord IN'orth tried to get the laugh on his own side by 
observing that Mr. Home thought, and before they had done 
with him would have the best of reasons for thinking, an or- 
der of the House as infectious as the hand of a bishop ; but 
there was no mistaking that the prevalent feeling even among 



446 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

the ministerialists was rather of sbame than of anger. Into 
what further depths of ignominy (asked William Burke) 
would a false sense of its honor and an extravagant concep- 
tion of its privileges debase that which had once been the 
first deliberative assembly in the world ? The latest adver- 
saries (he reminded his hearers) over whom they had tri- 
umphed were a milkman and a chimney-sweep; and it was 
difficult to say at what point of degradation they would stop, 
so long as they entertained the notion that it enhanced their 
dignity to have the lowest wretches in God's creation pros- 
trate before them. 

On the morrow Home, only too glad to be captured, was 
brought up in custody amidst the intense curiosity of a gen- 
eration among whom a clergyman who had renounced his 
calling was as rare a spectacle as a monarch who had lost his 
crown. The appearance and bearing of the cul23rit disappoint- 
ed the expectation and conciliated the favor of his judges. 
Dressed neatly in gray, though without his gown. Home be- 
gan by explaining his notion of his own position in respectful 
and manly words; and the remarks which he interjected in 
the course of the proceedings M'ere admirably placed, and en- 
tirely unanswerable. His main contention was that the law 
officers had nothing against him except the unsupported testi- 
mony of a man who had accused him in order to clear him- 
self. AVedderburn, veiling under a cloud of elegant plausi- 
bilities the confession that such was indeed the case, urged 
the House to adjourn the debate in a speech which Dunning 
likened to the argument of a prosecutor who should request 
the bench to allow him a day or two to look about for fresh 
evidence on the understanding that if time were given, the 
prisoner should without fail be proved guilty. But the House 
of Commons, while ready to usurp the authority of the courts 
of justice, had no intention of binding itself by their rules; 
and the adjournment was carried in spite of Edmund Burke, 
who entreated Lord Korth to remove from sight that "mon- 
ster of a motion," and to desist from engaging Parliament in 
a war with individuals, where victory could only be bought 
with the tears, and defeat would be attended with the scorn, 
of the whole kingdom. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 4-i7 

The affair resulted in the second of the two contingencies 
which Burke had foreshadowed. When the inquiry was re- 
sumed, it appeared that the new witnesses — to secure whom 
the House of Commons had borrowed a leaf from the code of 
procedure of the Spanish Inquisition- — ^were compositors from 
Woodfairs establishment ; one of whom had printed the man- 
uscript, but did not know the liandwriting, and another had 
heard his master say that ITorne was the author of the letter. 
Parliament, like the old gentleman in Racine's comedy, had 
of late years never been happy except when it was sitting as a 
criminal court; and by this time even the George Onslows 
had learned enough law to know that a man must not be con- 
victed on hearsay testimony. Fox, balked of his prey, turned 
angrily upon his brother-huntsmen, and upbraided the ministers 
for liaving passed over the publisher, of whom they were sure, 
in order to get at the writer, who had, after all* contrived to 
escape their clutches. A mutiny in the ranks of the govern- 
ment seldom fails to produce from the Opposition a copious 
expression of that sympathy which is more blessed to him 
that gives than to him that receives. "From the very first," 
observed Barre, "I augured that this business would end ill, 
and I felt inconceivable pain for the noble lord. Ilis followers 
were not to be depended on to fight for him. I know some 
little about the arrangement of troops; but in my life I never 
saw a body -of regulars cut so wretched a figure." And then, 
passing from condolence to ifony, the orator pointed to the 
unhappy leader of the House, as he sat between the solicitor- 
general, who had mismanaged the conduct of the case, and the 
Commissioner of the Treasury, whose rashness and self-will 
had been the origin of all the ministerial difficulties. " We 
have everything," he said, "to hope from the noble lord. He 
is at present most happily situated. If he wants law, he has 
but to look to the left ; while if he stands in need of common- 
sense, his spirited friend on the right can abundantly supply 
him." Amidst a shower of such taunts the curtain was 
dropped upon the miserable farce, and Home walked from 
the bar a free and a made man. The attention which his 
stroke of judicious audacity had attracted to Mr. De Grey's 



4i8 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

proceedings in Parliament stayed the progress of the enclos- 
ure bill nntil it had been altered to the satisfaction of all 
whose interests it affected. Kescned in a hopeless strait, Mr. 
Tooke repaid his preserver with an affection that was neither 
short-lived nor barren. Home, soon or late, received from his 
grateful friend over eight thousand pounds in money, a second 
name for himself, and the suggestion of that affected title by 
which, much better than by its contents, his book is known.' 
But his exertions acquired for him a reputation which extend- 
ed beyond the garden-walls of Purley, and procured him other 
benefactors liardlj^ less generous than its large-hearted owner. 
At every successive crisis in our liberties, when tyranny was 
so firmly in the ascendant that the hour demanded, not a 
champion, but a victim, all eyes were turned on the man who 
had braved the terrors of Privilege; and Home Tooke al- 
ways responded to the call, less eagerly and less boisterously 
as age and wisdom grew on him, but with the same constancy 
and self-possession as of old. He subsisted till past sixty 
upon means that were small and precarious ; but at length 
the people, mindful of the hardships which he had undergone 
in their cause, resolved that so much of his life as was passed 
outside Newgate and the Tower should be passed comforta- 
bly. Liberal subscriptions, followed, as time went on, by sub- 
stantial legacies, made him richer than he would have become 
if he had been permitted to wear the one gown or had never 
thrown off the other." City merchants and Cornish Dissent- 
ers could refuse nothing to one whose protest against the 
coercion of America by fire and sword had landed him in a 

^ As a matter of fact, not a line of Home Tooke's mngmim opus was 
written at Purley. The diversions iu which lie there indulged himself 
consisted in riding over the Downs by day, and playing piquet with his 
patron of an evening. 

== In 1773, when Home left the Church in order to read for the bar, he 
had nothing at all. He began the nineteenth century in a large house 
and grounds at Wimbledon with a clear annuity of eight hundred pounds. 
His style of living rose, until his friends estimated his yearly expenditure 
at more than twice that sum ; and he died leaving a handsome fortune, 
a cellar of good wine, and a library which contained a first folio of Shake- 
speare. 



1772-74.] CHARLES JAMES FOX. 440 

prison from which lie did not issue until he had left his health 
behind him ; and who had been placed in jeopardy of the 
gallows by liis declared determination that he would not cease 
his advocacy of parliamentary reform, as a remedy for domes- 
tic misgovernment, because we happened to be fighting with 
Jacobins in the Netherlands. 

Woodfall was discharged from custody after acknowledging 
the enormity of his fault, and imploring the clemency of Par- 
liament in abject terras; but there remained an offender from 
whom no apology could be accepted, if, indeed, there had been 
the slightest chance that any would be forthcoming. Fox 
this time had sinned beyond expiation. There was an im- 
pression abroad that, in harassing Lord North, he liad acted 
under secret orders from the king ; and his Majesty had no 
right to complain if that impression was strongest in the 
minds of those who had known what it was to serve him as 
leaders in the House of Commons. " It is supposed by most 
sensible people," wrote Lord Chatham, " that Mr. Charles Fox 
did not venture on a line of conduct which almost unavoida- 
bly called for the resentment of Lord North without support 
from some part of administration, and that tliat part must 
have some encouragement from the closet." But the suppo- 
sition was quite unfounded ; for the king already disliked 
Fox too heartily even to use him as an instrument for plagu- 
ing his own prime -minister. His dislike had not its source, 
as some aver, in disapprobation of the loose and ill-ordered 
life which the young politician had hitherto been leading. 
George the Third knew better than to be fastidious about the 
private conduct of the peers and commoners who consented 
to be the agents of his favorite political system. When Sand- 
wich was appointed secretary of state, the king took special 
pains to inform that immaculate statesman of his coming hon- 
ors in the manner which would be the most flattering and 
agreeable to their recipient ; ' and a monarch who went out of 

• " If you have not yet intimated to Lord Sandwich my intentions of 
intrusting him with the seals of the Northern Department, I wish you 
would not longer defer, as the manner greatly enhances or diminishes 
every favor" (George the Third to Lord North, December 14, 1770). 

29 



450 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [Chap. X. 

his way to malce a Mordecai out of Sandwich was not likely, 
on moral grounds, to make a Ilaman of anybody. The king's 
antipathy to his Jufiior Lord of the Treasury did not spring 
from the experience of what was bad in the young man's 
character, but from the promise of what was good. AVliether 
he abetted the royal policy, or whether he thwarted it. Fox 
never managed to please his sovereign. The very heat with 
which the rising orator attacked Wilkes and defended Low- 
ther w\as ominous and alarming in the eyes of a ruler who 
cherished every abuse in Church and State, and who felt an 
uneasy presentiment that, to whatever purpose fire might be 
put for the moment, its ultimate destination was to burn rub- 
bish. And more distasteful still in the Iiighest quarter was 
the uncalculating and unflinching chivalry wnth which Fox 
espoused any cause, however ostentatiously it might be frown- 
ed upon at St. James's, in behalf of which his personal convic- 
tions and feelings happened to be enlisted. The spirit and the 
independence which he exhibited over the Dissenters' Relief 
Bill and the Eoyal Marriage Bill were noted down by a 
master who seldom pardoned and never forgot. The king 
thenceforward abode in patient assurance that something 
would ere long occur to justify him in discharging his con- 
tumacious servant ; and as soon as he had learned the circum- 
stances which brought about the defeat of the government on 
the question of committing "VVoodfall to prison, he M^rote to 
the prime-minister as follows : " I am greatly incensed at the 
presumption of Charles Fox in obliging you to vote with him, 
and approve much of your making your friends vote in the 
majority. Indeed, that young man has so thoroughly cast off 
every principle of common honor and honesty that he must 
become as contemptible as he is odious; and I hope you will 
let him know you are not insensible of his conduct towards 
you." 

The delinquent awaited his sentence in joyous equanimity. 
When he appeared at Almack's on the fifteenth of February, 
flushed by his successful rebellion of the previous evening, 
he was asked on all sides whether Xorth had turned him out. 
" ISTo," he replied. " But if he does, I will write to congratu- 



1772-7-t.] CHARLES JAMES EOX. 451 

late him and tell him that if he had always acted with the 
same spirit, I should not have diltered with him yesterday." 
The prime-minister needed another week's pressure from the 
palace, and a fresh outbreak of insubordination on the part of 
Fox, to spur him towards a course of action which was alien 
both to his good-nature and his indolence. At last he nerved 
himself to write a letter which was said to run thus : " Sir, — 
His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission 
of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your 
name." A similar story is told about a very recent successor 
of Lord Korth, and perhaps was invented for one of his pred- 
ecessors; but whatever the form of the communication may 
have been, its substance soon became the property of the pub- 
lic. Twenty-four hours after he had been dismissed from of- 
fice. Fox was again haranguing the House of Commons with 
an easy magniloquence which provoked a Tory baronet into 
exclaiming that he talked as if the fate of Caesar and of Rome 
depended on his conduct. " The honorable gentleman," re- 
marked the speaker, "is tender in years, but tough in politics, 
and, if I do not mistake, has already been twice in and twice 
out of place." And when the sitting was over, and the full- 
dress sarcasms of debate gave place to the fraternal i-aillery 
of the lobby, George Selwyn took the earliest opportunity of 
setting afloat his view of an incident which, for a month to 
come, was sure to be in everybody's mouth. " Charles," he 
said, " for the future I will eat salt fish on the day you was 
turned out. You shall be my Charles the Martyr now ; for 
I am tired of your great-grandfather, the old one. His head 
can never be sewed on again ; but as yours can be, I will stick 
to you." 

And so Fox was once more out, and out for good ; and the 
first portion of his story had ended in a climax which fitly 
and harmoniously crowned the preceding narrative. Still of 
an age before which no English statesman can hope to accom- 
plish great things, he had at any rate given earnest of remark- 
able qualities. He had shown himself to possess in an unu- 
sual degree that recuperative power which is all but indis- 
pensable in a career where no one who fights to win can keep 



452 THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHARLES JAMES FOX. [CiiAr. X. 

himself out of the reach of a knock-down blow. An observ- 
ant veteran watches with almost pathetic interest the bearing 
of a young politician who has been flung off the ladder of 
promotion, or who has brought down upon his head a sudden 
avalanche of unpopularity ; and never did any one pick him- 
self up quicker than Charles Fox, and go to work again with 
more sublime indifference to jeers and bruises. And while 
his elasticity of temperament boded well for his own hap- 
piness, those who looked to him as a future servant of his 
country noticed in all that he said and did the unmistakable 
tokens of an ingrained disinterestedness, wdiich it required 
only a good cause to turn into heroism. He was not a polit- 
ical adventurer, but a knight-errant roaming about in search 
of a tilt, or, still better, of a melee; and not much caring wheth- 
er his foes were robbers or true men, if only there were enough 
of them. He was one who, in a venal age, looked to some- 
thing besides the main chance; who, when he had set liis 
mind or his fancy on an enterprise, never counted the odds 
that he faced, or the hundreds a year that he forfeited. But 
with all these generous gifts, his education and his circum- 
stances almost proved too much for him ; and it was the in- 
stinct of moral self-preservation wdiich drove him to detach 
himself from his early surroundings, and find safety in un- 
compromising hostility to that evil system which had come 
so near to spoiling him. 

" Are wills so weak ? Then let not mine wait long. 

Hast tliou so rare a poison ? Let me be 

Keener to slay thee, lest thou poison me." 

Such is the temper in which, fortunately for mankind, rare 
and noble natures have often revolted against that world 
whose blighting influence they had begun to feel ; and such 
was the mood of Charles Fox when, sick of a prison-house 
whose secrets had so early been familiar to him, he dissolved 
his partnership with Sandwich and Wedderburn, and united 
himself to Burke and Chatham and Savile in their crusade 
against the tyrann}'^ which was trampling out English liberty 
in the colonies, and the corruption which was undermining it 
at home. 



INDEX. 



[In tlie following Iiitlox the abbreviations / and .^ mean "following pages," and n or nn that 
ilie reference is to the foot- notes as well as to the pages iudicuicd.] 



Albemarle, Lord, "Memoirs of Rock- 
ingham," '200>i, 35Gk; portrait of Sir 
James Lowtlier, 35l)«. 

Almack, 75w, 300, ilSn, 419, 42i, 420, 
450/. 

Alinoii, John, on Charles Fox, 324. 

American colonies, some of the griev- 
ances of, W\f; tlie Stamp Act, 1 17 ; 
breach with England, 132 ; coercive 
measures determined on, 133; Wed- 
dcrbinn's denunciation of the wrongs 
of, 332. 

Anglo-Indians, purchase of boroughs by, 
in 1708, 12-)/: 

Apollonius Khodius, Charles Fox on, 
26 1«. 

Articles, Anglican, agitation against 
subscription to, 373_^. 

Artois. Comte d', 275. 

Askew, Mr., delivers tlie ]\Iiddlesex pe- 
tition to the king, 185«. 

Augusta, Princess - dowager, 20, 104/ 
145, 257«, 404. 

Aylesbury, tlie representation of, pur- 
chased by Wilkes, 141. 

Bacon, Lord, 99, lOOw. 

Bagot, SirW., 305,308. 

Barnard, Dr., his influence on Charles 
Fox, 43^. 

Barre, Colonel, 121, 219, 299, 308/, 
321, 327 ; deprived of his employ- 
ments by the king. 111; letter to 
Lord Chatham, 112«; on legal mem- 
bers of tlie Commons, 329 ; his de- 
nunciation of the Commons, 33S, 
338« ; attack on Sir Fletclier Norton, 
402 ; on Home's letter in tlie Public 
Advertiser, 447. 

Barrington, Lord, moves the expulsion 
of Wilkes from the House of Com- 
mons, 159. 



Bath as a gambling resort, 77w. 

Bathurst, Lord, letter to Lady Suffolk, 
433/: 

Beckford, Lord Mayor, 109, 224; his 
remonstrance with tlie king, 241/, 
249 ; Lord Holland's doubts about his 
prospects in a future life, ib. ; his de- 
nunciation of Lord Holland, 248/. 

Bedchamber. See Household. 

Bedford, Duke of, signs preliminaries of 
peace with France, 24/; his followers, 
29, 79, 122, 128/; 131/ 13-1/; 194^, 
207/; 255, 391, 392?i ; conference with 
Lord Rockingham, 122n, 123 ; his un- 
popularity% 187«; Junius's slanders on, 
ib. ; hunted from West of England, 
1 88 ; verses on, 188« ; letter to, from 
Lord Holland, 2'VSf. 

Berri, Due de, 275. 

Betting in the last century, 414^. See 
Brooks's; Gambling. 

Blackburne, Archdeacon, 374«. 377. 

Blackstone, Dr., speech on Wilkes, 100 ; 
on the Middlesex election petition, 
172 ; liis own "Commentaries" cited 
against him, ib., 173. 

Bloorafield, Robert, 210. 

Bloomsbury gang. See Bedford, Duke of. 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 73«, 80,417. 

Boswell, J., 152w, 332;; ; liis work on 
Corsica, 133/", 134?;; Lord Lonsdale's 
persecution of, 357/"; on Charles Fox 
at the Literary Club, 437/ 

Bottetort, Lord, 109. 

Brentford. See Middlesex election. 

Bribery, electoral and parliamentary, 

90/f', 9;!//; 97/ 1 1 1/; 1 24/: 2 1 2/ 2 1 0/; 

21!/, 331, 352. See Shoreham, New; 
Fox, Henry. 
Bright, j\Ir. John, on truth in morals 
and statesmanshi)), 115«; his sjieech 
on the Lish Chiu'ch Bill, 382. 



4:54: 



INDEX. 



Broad Church party, agitation against 
subscription, SUff. 

Brodie, Mr. Peter, 286. 

Brooks's, 7'), Ion, 76, 76n ; play at, 79n, 
418n, 419; the betting -book, il-t/T, 
425. See Ahuack. 

Bubb Dodington, on Henry Fox, 7 ; 
on the fall of Pitt, 2i\f; liis dispute 
with Lord Shelburne, iJiy. 

Bunbury, Sir Charles, on Charles Fox 
in the House of Commons, 175/2. 

Burgoyne, Colonel, 403. 

Burgoyne, Mr., 425. 

Burke, Edmund, 106, 110, 151, 161, 
165k, 166«, 171, 175, 194, 220, 279, 
307, 343, 345, 347, 366, 406/, 413, 
432n, 433«, 44(1/; 452 ; letter to Lord 
Rockingham, 70 ; on George III., 
70« ; on the cause of the discontent 
under George III., 100«, 182; on the 
reign of George II., 102 ; on political 
parties, 107, 120; on tlie true princi- 
ple of politics, 115 ; on Lord Kock- 
ingham's acceptance of office, 116/'; 
on the persecution of Wilkes, 142« ; 
speech in debate on expulsion of 
Wilkes from House of Commons, 
160?i ; on Wilkes, 164«; speech on 
Middlesex election, 170; on Middle- 
sex election petition, 173 ; on the 
constitutional questions involved in 
the persecution of Wilkes, 182/f ; 
leads W^hig agitation, 184/'; on Lord 
Ciiatham's return to public life, 191 ; 
simile on Lord Chatham, 196 ; on tlie 
break-up of personal government, 216 ; 
on tlie unconstitutional proceedings 
of tlie House of Commons, 225 ; iiis 
" Discontents " as compared with 
Johnson's "False Alarm,"228n, 229; 
on political quarrels, 243m ; reply to 
Fox on the law of libel, 294//'; eject- 
ed from the House of Lords, 299«; 
on the "Speaker's eye," 309; his ef- 
forts during debates on the press, 
309/f; reply to Sir Gilbert Elliot, 320/; 
on the trial of Lord Mavor Crosby, 
326 ; and of Alderman Oliver, 338 ; 
on the New Slioreham election, 350/: 
attempts to reconcile Fox and Wed- 
derburn, 354 ; on Sir G. Savile, 364?; ; 
dislike of arbitrary power, ib. ; dispute 
witii Charles Fox, 368/'; on Charles 
Fox, 3(>9» ; letter to Fanny Burney, 
372/; to Lady Huntingdon, 373 ; on 
clerical subscription, 381 « ; his reply 
to Sir W. Meredith, 384 ; on the i-e- 



lief of Dissenters, 388/; on the Koyal 
Marriage Bill, 400/, 402/'; opposition 
to Fox's morion for repeal of Lord 
Hardwicke's Marriage Act, 428; com- 
pared with Fox, 428/'; Dr. Johnson on, 
429 ; on parliamentary oratory, 430 ; 
his attacks on the Speaker of the 
House of Commons, 443n. 

Burke, William, 300, 338, 343, 446. 

Burnev, Miss, 109, 372/1 

Burns," R, 2157), 266, 412n. 

Bute, Lord, 23jf, 29, 31«, 56«, 94, 114. 
122«, 129, 145, 167, 173, 257, 330, 
346, 359, 404. 

Byron, Lord, 74n ; his " Hours of Idle- 
ness," 43/* ; his behavior to Lord Car- 
lisle, 54;i ; compliment to Wilkes, 
159n. 

Calcraft, Mr., 31/ 231n. 

Cambridge University, contest for the 
high-stewardsiiip of, 71_^; Junius on 
the high steward and chancellor. 
73/ 

Camden, Lord, 121 , 135, 1 94. 197/ 200/ 
205, 205n, 214, 218n, 230, 296,332«, 
333. 

Camden, 2d Lord, 206. 

Campbell, Lord, iiis "Lives of the Chan- 
cellors" cited, 173)), 205, 330/i. 

Carlisle, Lord, tribute to Charles Fox's 
schoolboy eloquence, 43, 43n ; lines 
on Fox, 43k ; his attentions to Lady 
Sarah Lennox, 52/; his "necessary 
banishment," 53/; Byron's treatment 
of, 54/1 ; journey across the Alps, 54/; 
with Charles Fox in Italy, a'tf; his 
life at Castle Howard, 87 ; reasons for 
declining the Bedchamlier, 108/i ; his 
description of 2d Lord Holland, 138n, 
139?/ ; on Stephen Fox, 170// ; letters 
to Selwyn on Charles Fox, 393n, 423^; 
on Fox's gambling losses, 423/; gives 
security for Fox's debts, 423 ; on Sel- 
wyn's electoral troubles, 431/; other 
references, 79, 130, 273, 286, 420. 

Carlyle, Mr., 9//, 19, 141//. 

Carnarvon, Lord. See Herbert, Henry. 

Caroline, Queen of Denmark, 399, 399/z. 

Carteret, Lord, on Henry Fox's mar- 
riage, 9//. See Granville. 

Cavendish, Lord John, 115, 120«, 161, 
318, 354«, 376, 433«. 

Cavendish, Mv. Henry (autlior of tlie 
"Debates"), 170/?," 175, 182n, 295/j, 
351//, 367//. 

Charlemont, Lord, 300/i. 



INDEX. 



455 



CHA 

Charles II., 2#, 9, lo."., 253. I 

Charlotte, Queen, 48. 
Chatham, Lord, on pailiamentnvy cor- ! 
niption, i);5 ; letter from the king, 
10i'>/'; his sympathy with tlie army 
and navy, ll'.in ; invited to form a 
government, 119 ; its composition, 
120/f'; failure of his administration, 
121/'; withdraws from the cabinet, 
122 ; on iiribery at the general elec- 
tion of 17G8, i2.". ; urgency of the 
king's letters to, 12'J;(; permitted to 
retire, 13.") ; remonstrates with George 
III., 189/"; returns to public life, 
lUoJf; Wilkes on, 190«; his domes- 
tic correspondence, ib. ; reconciliation 
with the Wiiigs, 191 ; his intended 
policv. 192; excitement at his return 
to public life, 193//"; Wilkes's pam- 
phlet against, 19."i« ; his defence of 
his assailant, 197; popularity of his 
orations in public schools, 196w ; 
speeches in House of Lords, 19(!/f'; 
influence of, 213/; on parliamentary 
bribery, 220/?'; speech denouncing of- 
ficial peculation, 29(5/^; reported by 
Junius, 297 ; insulted in House of 
Lords, 299 ; his treatment by the 
Peers, 303 ; on Lord Mayor Crosby's 
trial in Commons, 32 7« ; on Wedder- 
burn's defection from the Whigs, 333 ; 
on Lord North's cabinet, 345/"; ad- 
vice to his nephew, 37G ; on Charles 
Fox's opposition to Lord North, 449 ; 
minor references to, 181, 201/; 230, 
242, 255, 292, 338ft, 344, 38(5, 399h, 
452'. See Pitt. 
Chelsea Hospital, foundation of, 5. 
Chesterfield, Lord, G3, 77h, 125, 129, 

270, 376. 
Cholmondeley, Lord, 82, 415. 
Cliristian CUib. See tShoreham, New. 
Church of England, clerical objectors to 
subscription in, 373^'; meeting of ob- 
jectors, and petition to House of Com- 
mona, 375/'; opposition of the Evan- 
gelicals, 377 ; action of the Commons, 
380/; hititudinarian Bishops, 384/; 
secession of Lindsey, if>. See Lindsey ; 
Dissenters ; Nonconformists. 
Churchill, C, lines on Pitt the elder, 
24h ; on Henry Fox, 33n, 34n ; on 
Lord Sandwich, 69 ; on Sandwich and 
Wharton, 148ft; on his own career 
as a clergyman, 235h ; on Wedder- 
burn, 334n; his admiration for Wilkes, 
14Sn; his death, and character of his 



COM 

works, 147/r; also referred to, 333, 
374. 
Clarendon, Great Lord, 2n, 3, 200. 
Clermont, Lord, 417. 
Clinton, Ladv Lucy. 65n. 
Clive, Lord,"l84«, 218ft, 297; Charles 
Fox's denunciations of, 43t/, 43Gft, 
437rt ; his great political infiuence and 
his death, ib. 
Clubs, London, one of the objects for 

which instituted, 414. 
Cobbett,W.,374, 440. 
Coke, Sir Edward, on men who never 

prosper, 362h. 
Colebrooke, Sir George, his bill for in- 
creasing the East India Company's 
army, 306. 
Commons, House of, debates on Lord 
Hardwicke's Marriage Bill, 12/f; Pitt 
the elder's ascendency in, 20/'; how 
led by Henry Fox, 27/; approves the 
peace with France, 28 ; proscription 
of the Whigs, 29/"; its growing hos- 
tility to Henry Fox, 30/'; corrupted 
by the king, 110/ ; di\ision on the 
American question, 117; election of 
Speaker in 1768, 127w; the Wilkes 
controversy, 139/; debates on Wilkes, 
159/; on" the* jNIiddlcsex election, 
W^ff ; scenes in and outside the 
House, ib. ; conclusion of the debate, 
171/'; Luttrell declared elected, 171, 
176 ; on the petition of the electors, 
171jf ; effect of Chatham's speech- 
es, 199 ; George Grenville's Bribery 
Bill, 217^, 353/; abuses at trial of 
election petitions, 217w, 218ft ; pro- 
ceedings on the remonstrance of the 
City to the king, 224//'; Burke's and 
Wedderburn's speeches, 22.5/f' ; annul- 
ment of resolution against Wilkes, 
242«; conditions of success in, 24"/; 
discussions on the liberty of the press, 
291/; speeches of Fox and Burke, 
293/", 295w ; insulted by House of 
Lords, 2!)9; indignation of, appeased 
by Charles Fox, 30(»/f ; continued ill- 
feeling towards tlie Lords, 302ft ; pub- 
lic reports of speeches in, 304^'; ef- 
forts of the ministerialists to exclude 
the press from, ib. ; proceedings 
against the newspapers, 305 ; great 
debate on the press, 307/; the print- 
ers reprimanded by, 309/'; .lohn Whe- 
ble's defiance of, 311, 311n, 312ft; 
AVilkes's practical jokes on, 312/; in- 
sulted at the Mansion House, 314/; 



456 



INDEX. 



COK 

the Speaker's narrative to, 315; cold- 
ly received by the House, 316 ; Wel- 
bore Ellis onthe situation, 310/"; ex- 
cited debate in, 317//'; inflammatory 
speech of tSir Gilbert Elliot, 319/"; its 
effect, ih. \ Burke's reply, 320 ; Lord 
North's despondencv, 321/; speech of 
Charles Fox, 322/;" defeat of the Op- 
position, 324- ; Lord IMayor Crosby 
before, 325#', 334;/f, 34q/r; high- 
handed proceedings of, 32(i/'; legal 
and county members of, 327/; Wed- 
dcrburn, 33()/r'; canvass of gov- 
ernment against the lord mayor, 
335n ; surrounded by the mob, 330 ; 
its members maltreated, ib. ; speech 
of Alderman Townsheud, ib. ; help- 
lessness of government, 33(j/'; Al- 
derman Oliver before, 337^'; effect 
of Charles Fox's speech, 338/; re- 
newed rioting in Palace Yard, 340/'; 
action of the Speaker, 342 ; speech of 
Lord North, 343/; the king's friends 
in, 344 ; motion of Welbore Ellis, and 
committal of Crosby, ib. ; evades its 
own order, 345 ; action against Speak- 
er's messenger, lb. ; dissolution of Par- 
liament, 34() ; admission of reporters 
to, 347 ; effect of New Shoreham 
election, 350/; quarrel of Fox and 
Wedderbin-n, 353/; Sir G. Savile's 
and Sir W. Meredith's bills, 362//; 
speech of Charles Fox, 366, 367, 
367»; strange incident of a division in, 
308 ; proceedings on petition against 
clerical subscription, 371!/, 3S3/i ; 
speeclies of Burke and Savile, 382/ 
and of Charles Fox, 383/; petition 
of the Unitarians, 380; Nonconform- 
ists' disabilities, 385//'; petition of 
Dissenters against Dissenters, 387/; 
the Chin-ch Nullum Tempus Bill, 
3'J2/f ; proceedings on the Koyal Mar- 
riage Bill, 401/?'; power of Charles 
Fox in, 408 ; a German pastor on, 
432. See London ; Lords, House 
of. 

" Concealers," 362«. 

Conwav, General, 70«. 111??, 120j/, 123«, 
157,"20;), 401, 403, 408. 

Cooke, Mr., 153, 102. 

Cornwall is, Lord, 5. 

Cornwallisj Marquis of, 213. 

Corsica, cession of, to France, 133 ; 
struggle for independence, 13;/; sym- 
pathy for, in England, ib. 

Courtenay, Mr., 41 1«. 



Coventry, Lord, 87. 

Cowper," W., 85, Oln, 149, 181, 206, 
268«, 385n. 

Crabbe, G.,200. 

Crawford, Mr. (the elder), 252n, 435. 

Crawford, Mr., 405, 417, 433. 

Crewe, Mr., becomes security for Charles 
Fox's debts, 423. 

Crewe, Mrs., Fox's and Fitzpatrick's 
verses on, 284. 

Cromwell, ()., his speech to Long Par- 
liament ai)i)lied to Lord North's gov- 
ernment, '2'lln. 

Crosby, Lord Mayor, 314w, 315/ 325; 
his popularity, 321/'; his progress 
to House of Commons, 32.5/; trial 
of, 32(i/r; canvass of government 
against, 335«; drawn in triumph to 
the Mansion House, 336; again be- 
fore the Commons, 340/^; stratagem 
of, 344/; living in state in the Tower, 
345/; his liberation, 346. 

Cruden, A., anecdote of, 180«. 

Cumberland, dispute between the Duke 
of Portland and Sir James Lowtlier 
for possession of Inglewood Forest, 
357//. 

Cumberland, Duke of, 15, 18n, 83. 

Cumberland, Henry, Duke of. his ir- 
regularities, 395, 395?! ; marries Mrs. 
Ilorton, 394. 

Cust, Sir John, elected Speaker, 127?i. 

Custom-house, English, in the last cen- 
tury, 272/ 

Dalrvmple (Lord Bute's poet), 91?2. 

Dartmouth, Lord, 85, 210. 

Dash wood. Sir Francis, 26??, 71??, 141. 

Deffand, Mme. du, 271 ; her acquaint- 
ance with Walpole and Fox, 280/. 

De Grey, Attorney-general, 292. 

De Grev, Thomas, 303?? ; his dispute 
with Mr. Tooke, 442/r, 448/ 

D'Eon, Chevalier, his admiration for 
Wilkes, 1 79??. 

Derby, Lord, 415. 

Devonshire, Duchess of, her devotion to 
Charles Fox, 410, 411w. 

Devonshire, Duke of, 28, 41. 

Devonshire, Duke of ( the friend of 
Charles Fox), 411,41.-/. 

Diderot on Wilkes, 234. 

Dingley, candidate for Middlesex, 163??. 

Dissenters, the king's instructions to 
Lord North regarding, 1 14 ; griev- 
ances of, 385. See Nonconform- 
ists. 



INDEX. 



457 



Divorce in England in the last century, 

73n, 411'. 
Dodd, Dr.,4].-.. 

Dodington. 6'ee Bubb Dodington. 
Domitian. See Junius ; Francis, Sir 

riiilip. 
Dowdeswell, Vl?,n, 307, 32G, 345, 31)i)rt, 

444/i, 44.-). 
Drajicr, ISir William, his defence of Lord 

Granby, i>7 ; challenges Junius, 372;i. 
Dryden, J., ]43«; verses of, 2(un. 
Dunning, Solicitor - general, 201, 213, 

2'.)2, 2i)9«, 307, 3GG. 
Dyson, Jeremiah, 109, llSn, 215, 307. 

East India Company, bill for increas- 
ing army of, 30G. 
Eglinton, Lord, 11 Sn. 
Egremont, Lord, acquires the borough 
of Midhurst, 12G« ; on Charles Eox's 
ill-luck at hazard, 418. 
Election petitions, curiosities of the trial 

of, in last century, 217«. 
Eliot, George, her' " Daniel Deronda," 

5Sn. 
Elliot, Sir Gilbert, letter of Hume to, 
21 1«; on the jealousy of the English 
and Scotch, ib. ; inflammatory speech 
in House of Commons, 31!) ; other- 
wise referred to, 344. 
Ellis, Welbore, 215, 274, 316,344, 353. 
Emerson on success, 13G, 13G«. 
England in the early years of George 
III., declaration of war with France, 
18/"; fears of invasion, and political 
crisis in, 19/f"; triumidis under Pitt, 
20/; the peace with France, 24; Bute 
and Fo.x's administration, 24;/f ; social 
and moral condition of, Gl//'; ethics 
of the higher classes, 75 -, prevalence 
of gambling, 77^'; drinking and con- 
viviality, 82^;" religion among the 
middle' classes, SG/"; and in tiie higher, 
ib. ; country houses, ib. ; absence of 
political principle, 87/"; the sweets of 
office under George III. compared 
with those of the present day, SO/f, 
100 ; recipients of State pensions and 
of the royal bounty, 91n, '.)2n, OS/"; 
parliamentary corruption, 93/^, 124/f ; 
her liberties in danger of ijeing bribed 
away, 95« ; scramble for political 
prizes, 97; places, not measures, 98 ; 
rapid succession of administrations, 
99 ; general distrust of public men, 
99/; Burke on the situation, lOO/j ; 
her condition under George II., 102« ; 



the Rockingham administration,! K'!^; 
the general election of 17G8, 124 ; her 
attitude on tiieCJorsican struggle, 13.3/'; 
indignant at \Yilkes's treatment, 15(1/; 
deadlock of the Lords and Commons, 
158/'; agitation against the Duke of 
Grafton's goveriHiient, 18G/'; petitions 
to the king, 185n, 18G/'; joy at Lord 
Chatham's return to public life, 193^; 
fall of the Duke of Grafton, 21();^; 
Lord North's administration, 212//'; 
threatened revolution in, 230, 233/'; 
importation of foreign manners into, 
271 ; svmiJathy for the French e'mi- 
gres, 277/f ; English tourists on the 
Continent, 280 ; the struggle for the 
liberty of the press, 3()G^; agitation 
in the Church of, 375_^ (.see Church 
of England); effects of French Kevo- 
lution in, 388 ; the country and court 
parties, 390. See Commons, House 
of; Chatham, Lord, etc. 

Eton, moral change in, 42/i ; want of 
discipline at, 42/i, 43« ; Dr. Barnard'.s 
rule of, 44/7"; schoolboy effusions, ib. 

Euripides, Charles Fox's admiration for, 
2G2/, 408, 409«. 

Evelyn, John, on Sir Stephen Fox, 4/. 

FiTZMAURiCE, Lord Edmund, his Life 
of Lord Siielburne. 2(in. 

Fitzpatrick, Lady Mary (married Ste- 
phen Fox), 248», 253, 28?/, 285. 

Fitzpatrick, Richard, 5G, 7G«, 281, 41 1 ??, 
415, 434w; his friendship with Charles 
Fox, 283/f, 289 ; his taste for verse- 
making, 284 ; part author of the " Rol- 
liad," 285; his devotion to the stage, 
285/r; his verses on Lord Mulgrave, 
291;/ ; joins Charles Fox in the defence 
of New Shoreharn, 352/'. 

Fitzrov. Mrs., 78. 

Fitzwiiliam, Earl, 49, 28G, 400. 

Fleet marriages, 12/'; Lord Hardwicke's 
Bill, 12/; 413, 428. 

Foley, Lend, 422. 

Fontainebleau, preliminaries of peace be- 
tween France and England signed at, 
24 ; unpopularity of the treaty in Eng- 
land. 25. 

Foote, S., 152«; his "Nabob," 12Gn, 
418n ; his dramatic performances, 
172« ; his "Cozeners," 352n. 

" Foundling for Wit," 33«, 251n. 

Fox, Sir Stephen, founder of the Hol- 
land family, 1/; assists the escape of 
Frince Cliarles, 2; Memoirs of, \n; 



458 



INDEX. 



enters tlie service of the prince, 3 ; 
rise of liis fortunes, 4 ; iiis fidelity to 
the Stuarts, ib. ; embellishes Siirum 
Cathedra], 2>n ; his services under 
William III., 4; promotes the foun- 
dation of Chelsea Hospital, r> ; his do- 
mestic annals, ih. ; his death, 6. 

Fox, Lady (wife of 8ir Stephen), G ; ad- 
vice to her children, ib. 

Fox, Stejjhen (Earl of llchester), 7, 9/ 
See llchester, Lord. 

Fox, Charles (son of Sir Stephen), 5«. 

Fox, Henry (son of Sir Stephen), 3/, (\ff\ 
his loyalty to Sir Kobert Walpole, 7; 
story of his marriage, 8/'; his domestic 
relations, 10/"; opposes Lord Hard- 
wicke's Marriage Bill, 13/; his apti- 
tude as a debater, 14, 17/'; his inter- 
view with George III., 1.5; the king's 
opinion of him, ib. ; joins the cabinet, 
IG; Lord Granville's advice to, 10; 
becomes piiymaster of the forces, 21 ; 
his financial gains, 22 ; his will, 22/i ; 
on Charles Townshend, 2Gn ; his re- 
luctance to enter the cabinet, ib. ; be- 
comes leader of the House of Com- 
mons, 27 ; how he secured a parlia- 
mentary majority, 27^; urged to acts 
of spoliation by his colleagues, 29 ; 
general detestation of, 30 ; hostile mo- 
tions in the House of Commons against, 
ib. ; his quarrel with Lord Shelburne, 
31 ; his retirement from public life, 
ib. ; obtains a peerage and keeps the 
Pay-office, ib. ; repartee to Lord Bute, 
31k. /See Holland, 1st Lord. 

Fox, Lady Caroline (wife of llenrv Fox), 
10, 37/, 4G, 2u5/, 258. ,S'ee Holland, 
Lady. 

Fox, Stephen (2d Lord Holland), 38 ; 
Lord Carlisle on, 138«, 139, 139«; 
anecdotes of, 170« ; high pla\' of, 418/; 
his bodily appearance, 421 )i ; birth of 
3d Lord Holland, 425 ; Mr. Craw- 
ford's letter to, 433 ; other references, 
1G8, 1 75, 253, 28")/; 392. 

Fox, Charles James ( son of Henry 
Fox), Memorials of, by Lords Russell 
and Holland, In; birth of, 37; his 
boyhood, 37^; idolized by his f^ither, 
38/; his fondness for the stage, 39/'; 
his precocity, 39 ; sent to school to 
Wandsworth, 40; goes to Eton, ib. ; 
his school-days, 4 \f\ goes on the Con- 
tinent with his father, 42 ; Dr. Bar- 
nard's influence on, 43 ; his schoolboy 
efi'usions, 44», 45n ; picture of, by Sir 



Joshua, 45, 40??; on verse -making, 
4G« ; goes to Oxford, 49 ; his life and 
studies there, V.^ff; his love for Ox- 
ford, 50 ; letters of Dr. Newcome to, 
50, 51n ; goes to Najjles with his fa- 
ther, 51 ; his com])anions in Italy, 
5.'!/; and their proceedings there, 54/; 
his studies in Italian and French liter- 
ature, 5(i^; his talent for taking pains, 
57^; makes the acquaintance of Vol- 
taire, 59« ; returns to England, 59/; 
what conditions of society he finds 
there, Gl^; motion for the removal 
of Lord Sandwich, (>9« ; his entry 
upon public life, 73^; evil influences 
surrounding, 74^; Dr. Johnson on, 
103« ; chosen M.B. for Midhurst, 12G; 
ontsec of his parliamentary career, 
127 ; his political animosities, 128/; 
advice to his father, 129/? ; early indi- 
cation of his qualities, 130; his first 
ajipearance in Parliament, 130/; at- 
taclies himself to the Did;e of Grafton, 
135;;, 13G ; first years of his parlia- 
mentary career, 135/"; his maiden 
speecli, 138/; sketch of, 139, 428; 
canvasses for Colonel Luttrell, 1G8 ; 
speech in House of Commons, 1G9 ; 
his opinion of Foote, 172w; his re])ly 
to Wedderburn and Buike, 1 74/ 175« ; 
testimonies to his ability', 175, 175h ; 
on Sir G. Savile's censure of the House 
of Commons, 200 ; pays a tribute to 
Wilkes's consistency, 243 ; his rapid 
success in the House of Commons, 
24G ; his Parliamentary vagaries, 247, 
2G4; his trium])lis over Wedderburn, 
247h ; becomes Junior Lord of the Ad- 
miralty, ib. ; lampooned in the "Found- 
ling for Wit," 25Li ; his father's in- 
dulgence to, 252/, 254 ; his studies at 
King's Gate, 2G(1/; love for the clas- 
sics, ib. ; letters to Selwyn and Gilbert 
Wakefield, 2G1« ; his intended missive 
to Bonaparte,//;.; his admiration for 
Euripides, Homer, and Virgil, 2G2/; 
his devotion to literature, 2G4/; his fa- 
vorite works, 2(;4n, 2G5, 2G5n, 2GG ; at 
St. Anne's Hill and King's Gate, 267; 
fondness for rustic architecture, 2C8w ; 
his prodigality, 2G9/; in the society 
of great French ladies, 270/; his love 
for France, 279 ; his acquaintance 
with Mnie. du Detiand, 280^^; at the 
Clob a I'Anglaise, 280« ; Mme. du 
Deti'and's sketches of, 281./f ; letter to 
Lord Rockingham, 282« ; his friend- 



INDEX. 



459 



ship with Fitzpatrick, 28.1/; -W' -^^ > 
liis talent as a verse- maker, 284?i, 2.S5w ; 
his fondness for theatricals, and its ef- 
fect on his oratory, 285/f"; Grattan 
on, 288 ; Selwyn's bon-mot on, 28!}/'; 
speech on the law of libel, 293/", 2'JG ; 
Burke's rejily to, 294/; his resem- 
blance to his father, 3()5« ; on the in- 
sult offered by the Peers to the Com- 
mons, 30(]/'; on the press inquisition, 
305 ; otherwise referred to, 310/'; 
on Welbore Ellis's motion, 318n; on 
the conflict of the Commons with the 
City, 322//'; causes of his unpopularity, 
323/; John Almon on, 324 ; at the 
trial of Lord Mayor Crosby, 32(5/'; 
enunciates a new legal principle, 337 ; 
at trial of Alderman Oliver, 338^; 
popular detestation of, 339/'; maltreat- 
ed by the mob, 341 ; foolish story con- 
cerning, 341n ; advocates publicity of 
debate, 347/' ,• his devotion to the king's 
cause, 348/'; his struggle in defence of 
New Shoreliam, 351//'; opposition to 
G. GrenviUe's Bribery Bill, 352/; his 
quarrel with Wedderburti,353/; speech 
in defence of Sir J. Lowther, 'iW\ff\ 
3()7« ; its residt, oGS/'; his admiration 
of Burke, ib. ; Junius's attack upon, 
370; attempts to unmask his antago- 
nist, 371, 372n ; seconds Sir W. Mere- 
dith's protest against the Criminal 
Code, 373 ; on religious tests, 331, 376, 
382//'; his conduct on the Dissenters' 
Keiief Bill, 388/; later feeling of the 
Nonconformists towards, 389« ; his 
evil surroundings, 39(/; a Quaker's 
letter to, 391w; popular reprobation 
of, 391n, 392^; quarrels with Lord 
North, 392//'; leaves ofHce, 393 ; Lord 
Carlisle on, 393« ; his attitude on the 
Eoyal Marriage Bill, 404. 40(!/; rea- 
son' for leaving office, 405/'; effect of 
his resignation on Royal Marriage 
Bill, 40(/, 40(J« ; his victories over the 
lawyers, 407 ; reasons for his attack 
on the Marriage Bill, 408 ; his domes- 
tic happiness, 408, 409n ; fondness for 
country life, 409«, 410n; vers da so- 
cie'te on, 410, 422 ; his chivalrous re- 
spect for women, 410, 412; letters to 
Duchess of Devonsiiire, 410, 410», 
41 In ; sketched by the Duchess, 411; 
on the death of Pitt the younger, 4 Iln ; 
his legislative efforts in behalf of wom- 
en, 41 2 ; his bill for the repeal of Lord 
Hardwicke's Marriage Act, 413, 428 ; 



eccentricities of his private life, 413; 
records of his bets, 410^'; his ill-luck 
at hazard, 418; verses on his ill-luck 
at play, 418 ; his fondness for sport, 
42()//'; his racing adventures, 421 ; 
his dealings with the Jews, 422/' ; 
his friends go security for his debts, 
423; his father's liberality to, 425/; 
his financial catastrophe, ib. ; turns 
his attention towards the bar, 425 ; 
compared with Burke, 428/; his elo- 
quence, 429 ; on his own and Pitt's 
oratory, ib. ; a Prussian clergyman 
on, 429/; affection of t!ie Wliigs for, 
434« ; efforts of Lord North to recover 
his services, 434/; fascinates a Tory 
schoolmaster, 434n ; offered a place in 
the Treasury, 435 ; denunciations of 
Lord Clive, 43'"/; his conduct in re- 
gard to the press, 437/; at the Liter- 
ary Club, 438, 438« ; on John Home, 
445/'; his opposition to Lord North, 
449 ; the king angry with, 450/; Lord 
North's letter of dismissal to, 451 ; 
G. Selwyn on, ib. ; close of the first 
part of his career, 451/". 
Fox, Mrs. Charles, 2G4, 265«, 267n, 284n, 

409n. 
Fox, Henry Edward (1st Lord Hol- 
land's youngest son), 37n, 53, 256. 
France, declaration of war with England, 
18/; grandes dames of tiie old regime, 
270/; English visitors to, 272/'; the 
passage from Calais to Dover, 272« ; 
English visitors shopping in, 273 ; 
courtesy towards British tourists in, 
274/*; French men of letters, 275^'; 
horror inspired by the Revolution in 
England, 277/'; and its effects, 388. 
See England ; Walpole, Horace ; 
Hume, David, etc. 
Francis, Dr., tutor of Charles Fox at 
Eton, 41w; his connection with the 
Hollands, ib. 
Francis, Sir Philip (Junius, Mnemon, 
etc.), obtains a government clerkship, 
41; after-dinner abstemiousness of, 
82 ; reports speeches in House of 
Lords, 297 ; Messrs. Parkes and Mer- 
ivale's Memoir of, 372?i ; George HI. 
on, 443. See Junius. 
Frankland, Admiral, on parliamentary 

privilege, 306/'. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 120«, 132 ; on 
George HI. and Wilkes, 156n; on 
London I'ioting, 16S)j ; cited, 374. 
Frederic the Great on Pitt, 19/; al- 



460 



INDEX. 



leged to liave been betrayed by Bute, 
25; his opinion on Corsica, IS-t. 
Frederic, Prince of Wales, 103/'; fool- 
ish funeral sermon on, 103«. 

Gambling, aristocratic, in the last 
centur}', llff; its deplorable conse- 
quences, S()^; Charles Fox's losses, 
418,423/. 6'ce Brooks's. 

Garrick, David, admonished by Wilkes, 
180 ; on private tiieatricals, 2S7n ; his 
foreign tour, ib. ; other references to, 
240, 399n. 

Genoa cedes Corsica to France, 133. 

Geoi'ge ir., policy of, 102; his death, 
102« ; Lord Chatham's estimate of, 
118 ; on spurious and genuine king's 
speeches, 170. 

George III., Henry Fox's interview 
with, 15/'; commencement of his 
reign, 2;^/; gives a place in the cabi- 
net to Henry Fox, 2G/'; countenances 
the proscription of the W^liigs, 28/"; 
satisfaction of his court, 30 ; pro- 
poses to Lady Sarah Lennox, 47; the 
result, 48^; marriage of, 48 ; letter 
of, to Lord North, 04 ; his indulgence 
to the Duke of Grafton, 75; his the- 
ories of government, 70 ; results of his 
policy, «i. ; his temperate and vigorous 
habits, 83, 84« ; houseliold of, S.")/"; 
place-hunting under, 8!)^; profits and 
position of crown servants compared 
with those of th^ jnesent day, 88^, 
100/"; popidar notion of, 103 ; edu- 
cation of, lOI/"; his preceptors, 105; 
his intellectual and business qualities, 
100/"; letter to Chatham, 100; polit- 
ical theories of, 100^, Woff; changes 
of his advisers, ]0(j/; attempts to 
form a party of his own, 107; char- 
acter and duties of the king's friends, 
108/f; his private associates, t'A.; how 
he manipulated the House of Com- 
mons, 111 ; letter to his minister, «i.; 
his treatment of veterans of the army, 
112/"; his electioneering operations, 
113f; conduct to Chancellor Legge, 
114 ; invites Lord Kockingham to liis 
councils, 110; plots his fall, 117/f; 
his pledges to Kockingham, Win ; 
popular estimate of him, 119n; dis- 
misses Lord Kockingham and invites 
Chatham to form a government, 119 ; 
his theory of party, 120; end of his 
first Parliament, 123; elections for 
the new one, 12+_^; his urgent letters 



to Chatham, 129»; the quarrel with 
America, 132; his resentment against 
Wilkes, 143^; misses his opportuni- 
ty in reference to Wilkes, 155//'; in- 
structions to Lord North, 157, 214n, 
385; on the Wilkes debate, 102 ; his 
speech proroguing Parliament, 170; 
his nnpopidarity, 177/'; his coolness 
when insulted by the mob, 177, 178/i ; 
at Drury Lane, 180n; receives the 
Middlesex petition, 185« ; and peti- 
tions from the counties and cities, 
18(!/?', 189; action of his ministers 
against the Whig agitation, 187//"; 
Lord Chatham's remonstrance with, 
1 8!J/; persuades Charles Yorke to ac- 
cept the great seal, 20(;/'; his reluc- 
tance to invest the 2d Lord Cam- 
den with the Garter, 200 ; fall of the 
Duke of Grafton's administration, 
210; Lord North as his ]irime-min- 
ister, 212; reign of bribery, ib. ; the 
great seal intrusted to commission- 
ers, 214 ; apparent success of his the- 
ories, ib.\ Junius's strictures upon his 
rule, 2\'if; character of his agents, 
21(!/"; expenditure of his Civil List, 
2i;i/'; petitions to, to dissolve Parlia- 
ment, 221/r; his recejjtion of the City 
lemonstrance, 222/'; joint lebuke of 
City by Lords and Commons, 220; 
the Westminster and IMiddlesex re- 
monstrances, 227/; Junius's letter to, 
and its consequences, 229/"; deaf to 
the comi)]aints of his subjects, 231 ; 
indignant with his ministers, 232« ; 
on Jjord Geoige Sackville's duel with 
Governor Johnston, 302« ; insists on 
fighting out the quarrel of press and 
Parliament, 307 ; admonishes Lord 
North to let Wilkes alone, 313; per- 
emptory instructions to his minister, 
315 ; proposes to take the lord may- 
or to Westminster by water, 324/; ob- 
stacles to the success of his policy, 
355/", action of his goverimient in 
tiie dispute between tiie Duke of 
Portland and Sir James Lowther, 
35S//; on the Articles of Keligion, 
379 ; his hostility to tiie Nonconform- 
ists, 380, 389/"; 'his brothers, 394/; 
his anger at the marriage of tiie Didce 
of Cumberland, 394/ 397 ; tiie Royal 
Marriage Bill, 397/; higli- handed 
treatment of the Commons, 402/"; on 
Sir Piiilip Francis, 443; his dislike 
for Charles Fox, 449y: 



INDEX. 



461 



Germaine, Lord George. See Sackville. 

Gibbon, on Wilkes, 28'J«; on the recep- 
tion of Englisli visitors in France, 
274; iiis predilection for Frencli so- 
ciety, 27(}/'; on the French Revolu- 
tion, 277 ; on Gliarles Fox, 405, 434 ; 
in the House of Gommons, 432. 

Gladstone, J\Ir., on Wilkes, 140. 

Gloucester, Bisliop of, on the Royal 
Marriage Bill, 400n. See Warbur- 
ton. 

Gloucester, Duke of, marriage of, to 
Lady Waldegrave, 3i)G/". 

Glynn, Sergeant, Wilkes's colleague in 
the representation of Middlesex, 1G2, 
1G4, 18.-., 242, 292/: 

Goethe on the English character, 279, 
279n. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 164; Charles Fox on 
the "Traveller," 26G«; his "Haunch 
of Venison," 30Sn. 

Gower, Lord, 123, 209, 215; motion in 
House of Lords against reporters, 
298/ 

Grafton. Duke of, 29, 75, 9 In, 93, 129, 
]63n, 1G5, 193/, 200/7", 207, 209, 
212, 303, 395«; his relations with 
Miss Nancy Farsons, G4«, G5 ; his 
administration, G(!^; Horace Wal- 
pole on, G9 ; becomes Chancellor of 
Cambridge Universit}', 72, I'dn ; con- 
gratulated by Jimius, 72, 73 ; Gray's 
ode on, l?>n ; a dinner given by, 94re; 
as First Lord of the Treastny, 1 21 ; 
seeks alliance with tiie Bedfords, 
122/; becomes prime-minister, 135; 
Charles Fox's estimate of, 135« ; 
Wilkes's letter to, 150 ; agitation 
against his government, lS4j^'', 189; 
changes in his administration, 200/f ; 
his resignation and retirement, 20!)/'; 
Junius's diatribes against, ib.; break- 
ing-up of his government, ib.; speech 
of, reported in Woodfall's journal, 
297 ; letter of Junius to, 333 ; his at- 
tack on the Duke of Portland, 35G, 
358, 3GL 
Grammont, Count, 6, 427. 
Granby, Lord, 97, 135, 157, 194, 200, 
213 ; apology for his part in the Mid- 
dlesex election, 199. 
Grand tour, experiences of the, 55k. 
Grantham, Lord, 272. 
Granville, Lord, his compliment to Hen- 
ry Fox, 1G« ; refuses to accept the 
Treasurv, 19 ; his advice to Henry 
Fox, ib^ 



Grattan, Henry, on Charles Fox as an or- 
ator, 288; on Burke's Toryism, 3G4/i. 

Gray, T., lines on Henry Fox, 34, 34n ; 
ode on the installation of the Duke of 
Grafton as Chancellor of Cambridge, 
73rt ; on Boswell's book about Corsi- 
ca, 134n. 

Green, Bishop of Lincoln, 389. 

Grenville, George, 2G, 42n, 9 In, 93, 
98, 110, 115, 117, 127, 109, 171/; 
184n, ISG, 19I,213n, 27G«, 42Gn ; on 
the grand tour, 55« ; antipathy to 
king's friends, 110; on motion to 
expel Wilkes from House of Com- 
mons, 159/; on Wilkes's popidarity, 
182; his Bribery Bill, 217^, 349, 
352n, 353/'; proposal for inquiiy into 
the Civil List, 219/"; quarrel of Fox 
and Wedderburn about, 353/; speech 
of Burke, 354. 

Grenville, George (the younger), 55n, 

Grenville, James, 2I4n. 

Grenville, Thomas, 42n, 18Gn. 

Grenville papers, 42n, 43n, G5n. 

Halifax, Lord, 181, 214, 313. 

Hamilton, Duchess of, 153. 

Hamilton, William Gerard, 95n, 300n. 

Harcourt, Lieutenant-colonel, 403. 

Hardwicke, Lord, his Marriage Bill, 
lIjT"; its defects, 12/; opposed by 
Henry Fox, 13/; his i)hilippic against 
Fox, 15; referred to, 203 ; Ciiarles 
Fox's bill for rej^al of his Marriage 
Act, 413, 427, 431. 

Hardwicke, Lord (son of the preced- 
ing), contests the High - stewardship 
of Cambridge University with Lord 
Sandwich, 70/'; his apologies for 
Charles Yorke, 203n ; joint author of 
the "Athenian Letters," /6.; his let- 
ters cited, 205n; entreats his broth- 
er to resign the chancellorship, 207/; 
grief for his brother's loss, 208. 

Harley, Lord Mayor, Lord Holland's 
memorial of, 255n. 

Harris, ]\Ir., 49n. 

Hartington, Lord, 21 8«, 475n. 

Hawke, Lord Admiral. 157. 

Hayley, W., Charles Fox's appreciation 
of, 2G5. 

Heine, Heinrich, 215. 

Heinel, Mile., 415. 

Herbert, George, 392. 

Herbert, Henry, 317. 

Hertford College, Oxford, Charles Fox 
at, 49^, oln. 



462 



INDEX. 



Hertford, Lord, 210, 272, 397n, 432. 

Hertford, Lady, 78. 

Herve\-, Augustus, 74re. 

Hickey, electioneering .ngent, I2'm. 

Hobart, Mr., his frolic at Lady Tauker- 
ville's, 66n. 

Holbach, Baron d', 147, 238, 274. 

Holland, 1st Lord (Henry Fox), de- 
fection of his associates, 3iy; public 
estimate of his character, 32^; 
lampoons and satires on, 33n, Sinn ; 
his private life, 3")/'; quarrel with Rig- 
by, 3(5/; his domestic happiness, 37 ; 
his children, 37«; Holland House, 
37?i ; love for his family, 38/; letters 
to Lady Holland, ib. ; his dependents, 
41 w ; on his son Charles's studies, 51 ; 
takes him to Naples, 51/; his social 
qualities and literary talents, 52 ; his 
verses on Rigby, 52« ; his poetical re- 
monstrance to Lady Sarah Lennox, 
52« ; his stay at Nice with his chil- 
dren, 54 ; letter fiom Voltaire to, 5'.)n ; 
his evil influence on Charles Fox, 
74/; his advice to Lord Siielburne, 
97; clubs with Lord Ilchester to hire 
a borough for their sons, 12G^; his 
isolation in English politics, 127; or- 
dered to resign the Pay-office, 127, 
255 ; ins advances to the Wiiigs re- 
jected, 128; considers himself an in- 
jured man, ib. ; his suit for an earl- 
dom refused, 12!)«; on Corsica and 
the Corsicans, iftlw ; his support 
of Colonel Luttrell, 1G7; deligiit at 
Charles Fox's rejily to Burke and 
Wedderburn, 175; remarks on Charles 
Yorke, 208/* ; on C'harles Fox's par- 
liamentary success, 247/; his reply to 
the allegations of Beckford, 249/;" his 
enormous gains, 250 ; his communi- 
cation to Baron Smith, 250« ; popu- 
lar hatred and denunciation of, 251 ; 
character and disposition of, 2'Aff: 
his treatment of his children, 252«, 
253; his wealth, ib.; his marine re- 
treat at King's Gate, 254, 258/?^; re- 
fused a step in the peerage, 25Gj/; re- 
signed to his lot, 258 ; careless of his 
son's prodigality, 2G!»/; on Burke, 
3G8; antipathy of his family to the 
Royal Marriage Bill, 404 ; his dissat- 
isfaction with Charles Fox, 405; de- 
lighted with his son's triumphs over 
the lawyers, 407; arranges for p.ay- 
ment of Charles Fox's debts, 425; 
reason for desiring his son's mar- 



riage, 42G ; his talent as a debater, 
428 ; his satisfaction at seeing ("harles 
Fox in the Treasury, 43r>/'. See Fox, 
Henry. 

Holland, Lady Caroline, 270, 321. See 
Fox, Lady Caroline. 

Holland, 2d Lord. See Fox, Stei)hen. 

Holland, 2d Lady. See Fitzpatrick, 
Ladv Mary. 

Holland, 3d Lord (Henry Richard Fox, 
son of the preceding). In, 13, 2G9/?, 
405, 418 ; on Charles Fox, 57, 409 ; on 
Lope de Vega, 2GGn; his birth, 424. 

Holland House, 37«. 

Holland, Earl of, 37n. 

Holt, Lord Chief-justice, ISGre. 

Homer, Charles Fox"s love for, 2G2n, 
408. 

Home, Rev. John, 82rt, 152^; his ac- 
tivity during the Middlesex election, 
152, \')2n; his account of the king's 
reception of the City remonstrance, 
223n ; career of, 439j/; his quarrel 
with Wilkes, 441 ; his letter in the 
Public Advertiser, 444/; ordered to 
attend at the House of Commons, 
44r/; letter to the House, 44G; his 
triumph over the Commons, 447/; his 
reputation as a politician, 448ft ; his 
" Diversions of Furley," ib. 

Horton, Mrs., 394. 

Household of George IIL, 8.5/, lOSn. 

Hume, David, 147/, 270 ; his sympathy 
for George HI.'s policy, 21(1^; his 
dislike of the English people, 211/; 
correction of his history, 212 ; proph- 
esies an English revolution, 232 ; on 
cookery and history, 232« ; his recep- 
tion in France, 275/, 27G« ; on the 
different position of literary men in 
England and Fiance, 27([/; Walpole 
on, 27G?i, 277n. 

Hunt, Dr., his conversation with Fox 
on clerical subscription, 37G. 

Huntingdon, Countess of, her crusade 
against the latitudinarians, 378j/. 

Huntingdon, Lord, and Mr. Lindsey, 
378, 378ft, 379«. 

Hutchinson, John Hely, 300n. 

Ilchester, Lord, 41 5; clubs with Lord 
Holland to purchase a borough, 126^. 
See Fox, Stephen. 

Inglewood Forest, quarrel of Duke 
of Portland and Sir James Lowther 
about, 358^; wholesale actions of 
ejectment in, 3G3. 



INDEX. 



463 



Ireland the pvey of English phxce-hnnt- j 
ers, 1)5/: * 1 

Italy, Englisli tourists in, in the last cen- 
tury, i>[>n. 

Jami;s I., Quieting Act of, 3G2/. 

James II., 4, ~>ii. 

Jeffreys, Judge, 22G«. 

Jesse, Mr., 2Gi)«. 

Johnson, Dr., 7r,n, din, 134, 152«, 374, 
438/; on Charles Fox's jioliiical 
power, 152w; his anecdote of Lord 
Shelburne, 132/i; his suggestion of 
ducking Wilkes, 145 ; becomes a 
political writer, 228/; on Garrick, 
240n ; his meeting with Wilkes, ib. ; 
Charles Fox's criticisms on his " Lives 
of the Poets," 2G3 ; on lawyers can- 
vassing for briefs, 332« ; on the Gren- 
ville Bribery Act, 3r)2« ; on Burke's 
oratory, 42'.t ; Avith Ciiarles Fox at 
the Literary Club, 437/ 

Johnston, Governor, his duel witli Lord 
George Sackville, 302«. 

Junius, on the Duke of Grafton and 
]\[iss Nancy Parsons, Gin; on Lord 
Weymouth, GQ ; causes of his popu- 
larity, G'J ; on the High Steward and 
Chancellor of Cambridge University, 
72/; on parliamentary corruption, 
93; on George III. and Wilkes, 
15G« ; cited, 1G3«; his earlier and 
later letters, lG5w ; on the JNIiddlesex 
election riot, 1GG« ; his reverence for 
Wilkes, 178; his li bels on t he Duke 
of Bedford, 187w,TSy« ;'TiTr diatribes 
"oiTtlirDuke^QfjQrafton, 209, 210; 
tetter of, to the kingr229/; 290 ; his 
strictures on Lord Mansfield, 230; his 
denunciations of Lord North, 231./f ; 
his foot-notes, 231 ; letters to Wilkes, 
234/; his reports of speeches in the 
House of Lords. 297/'; on the tumult 
in the Lords, 299 ; referred to, 330rt, 
331 ; on Wedderburn's treachery, 
334; on the maxim "Nullum tem- 
pus occurrit regi," SGOn, oGlw; re- 
plies to, of ministerial writers, 3G1/; 
attacks Charles Fox, 370 ; refuses 
to disclose himself, 371, 372n ; re- 
fuses to fight Sir W. Draper, 372« ; 
on marriage of the Duke of Cum- 
berland, 395« ; letters to the Duke 
of Grafton and to Wilkes, ib. ; pre- 
paring to go to India, 442/; his 
rejilv to Home, 442. See Francis, Sir 
Philip. 



LON 

Kkan, Edmund, 3G3. 

Kildare, Lord, 54. 

King's friends, 108/", 344, 887. See 
George IIL ; Commons, House of. 

King's Gate, Lord Holland's mai-ine re- 
treat, 254/; 255«, 258/; 2G8. 

Kingston, Duchess of, her revenge on 
Foote, 172«. 

Kinnoul, Lord, 250n. 

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, his picture of Lady 
Fox, G. 

Lardneu, Dr., on the general election 
of 17G8, 373/ 

Lauderdale, Lord, 41 0», 434n. 

Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, 1 39. 

Lawyers, unpopularity of, 328/*. 

Lee, John, counsel for the Middlesex 
election petitioners, 171; on Savile's 
speech on clerical subscription, 382/ 

Legge, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
treatment of by the king, 114. 

Lennox, Lady Caroline, 8^. See Fox, 
Lady ; Holland, Lady. 

Lennox, Lady Sarah, 41;?, 175«, 404; 
her extraordinary beauty, 4C/; Hor- 
ace Walpole on, 4G ; proposed to by 
George 111., ib. ; Sir Joshua's picture 
of, 4Grt ; accident to, 47/; the king's 
anxiety about, 47; reappearance at 
court, and end to her hopes, ib. ; her 
own letter on the subject, 48?j ; her 
children, 48/; Lord Carlisle's atten- 
tions to, 52 ; Lord Holland's remon- 
strance with, o3«. 

Libel, law of, 289/r. See Press. 

Liberal party, first foraiation of, 115, 1 IG. 

Lincoln, Lord, 9, 10. 

Lindsey, Kev. T., his scruples about 
subscription to the Church of England 
Articles, 375 ; his canvass among the 
clergy, 37.5/; his success with the 
Wliigs, 37G ; opposed by the Evan- 
gelicals, 377 ; his discussion with 
Lord Huntingdon, 377, 377n, 378n ; 
petitions the House ofCommons,378/'; 
secedes from the Establishment, 384/; 
Cowper's lines on, 385n; also referred 
to, 392«. 

Llovd, Robert, his verses on Wilkes, 
1S0«. 

London, in the last century, dissatisfac- 
tion of, with the government of Bute 
and Henry Fox, 29 ; riotous scenes 
during the Middlesex election, 152/f ; 
enthusiasm for Wilkes, 15G, 1G2 ; col- 
lision with the troops, 155 ; elects 



464 



INDEX. 



Wilkes nlderman, 162 ; prepares for 
a conflict with Parliament, ib. ; in- 
efficiency of the constables, IGG, 168w; 
frequency of rioting, 1G8«, 177, 178?«; 
excitement caused by the Middlesex 
election, lG8_/r; dej)utation of citizens 
to the king, 177/'; ballads of the day, 
178n; remonstrance against the gov- 
ernment, 188, 221/'; reception of the 
remonstrance, 22'2ff; counter -pro- 
ceedings in the Commons, 224/J 315/^'; 
tiie corporation rebuked by Parlia- 
ment, 227 ; elects Wilkes sheriff and 
lord mayor, 237 ; makes him cham- 
berlain, 238 ; conflict with House of 
Commons, 296/?', 314^; action of the 
City in defence of tiie press, 310//'; 
scheme of the king against the lord 
mayor, 32.">/; ovation to the latter in 
his progress to the House of Commons, 
326/; his trial, 326//'; demonstration 
of the populace against the Commons, 
334^'; riot in Palace Yard, 336/; 
corte'ge of the citizens conducting 
Crosby to Westminster, 310 ; renewed 
rioting, ib. ; appeased by the Whigs, 
312 ; enthusiastic reception of Crosby 
and Ohver on their liberation, 316. 
See Commons, House of; Wilkes; 
Crosby, etc. 

Lonsdale, Lord. See Lowther, Sir 
James. 

Lope de Vega, 266ra. 

Lords, House of, the debates of 1770, 
196/f'; speeches of Chatham on bri- 
bery and the Civil List, 220 ; on of- 
ficial peculation, 296/'; speech of the 
Duke of Grafton, 297; reports of Ju- 
nius, 297/'; tumult in, 299/'; forcible 
ejection of members of the Commons, 
300 ; rejects bill for relief of the Non- 
conformists, 387, 389 ; the lioyal 
Marriage Bill in, S'.)7ff. 

Lougiiborough, Lord. ^ee Wedder- 
burn, A. 

Lowtiier, Sir James, at Newmarket, 79 ; 
instigates the quarrel between Lord 
George Sackville and Governor Jolin- 
ston, 301 ; character of, 357 ; Lord 
Albemarle's portrait of, 356n ; his 
treatment of Boswell, 357/"; of the 
Wordsworths, 357« ; lines in the 
"Rolliad" on, 3r)8?? ; claims the es- 
tate of Inglewood Forest as against 
the Duke of Portland, 358/"; his claim 
countenanced by government, 360 ; 
unseated for Cumberland, 362 ; whole- 



sale litigation by, 363 ; explanations 
in the House of Commons, 361 ; Sir 
W. Bagot's defence of, 366 ; defeat 
of his claims, 370. See Portland, 
Duke of 

Lumm, Mrs., 78. 

Luttrell, Colonel Henry, government 
candidate for Middlesex, 167«, 168//'; 
declared the elected member, 1 70, 
1 76 ; otherwise referred to, 1 71, 212/, 
320, 317, 391. 

Lyttelton, 2d Lord, 5:>n, 81, 122. 

Macartney, Sir George (afterwards 
Lord), 41«, 128, 266rt. 

]\lacaulay, Catherine, contemporary 
opinion of her as an historian, 120/^ 

Macaulay, Lord, r.«, Sin, 110, 120», 
2r)9n, 261 w; on "Voltaire's ignorance 
of England, 85 ; on Charles Fox's ad- 
miration for Apollonius Rhodius, 
261»^; on his favorite passage in the 
" Alcestis," 109«. 

Mackintosh, Sir James, on the Roval 
INLirriage Bill, 399«. 

Malmesbury, 1st Lord, 19«. 

Manchester, Duke of, 298. 

Mann, Horace, Walpole's letters to, Gin, 
68w, 71, \02n, 231, 127. 

Mansfield, Lord, 75, 98, 131, 142, 146, 
151, 1.-).-), 165», 198, 201, 210, 299, 
39 1 ?z, 398; his charge at tiie Wood- 
fall trial, 231 ; dictum on the law of 
libel, 291 ; his draft of the lioyal Mar- 
riage Bill, lOOn, 406, 441, ^ee 
Murrav. 

March, Earl of, 79, 113, 158, 273, 274, 
415/; his correspondence, 74 ; letter 
to Selwyn, 80«, 81« ; lord of the 
bedchamber, 108. See Queensberry. 

Martindale, Mr., 77?;. 

Masham, Lord, 79. 

Mason, W., 33; lines on George III., 
81«; on Lord Holland, 257?;; criti- 
cism on Fox's and Fitzpatrick's verses, 
284. 

Massey, Mr., his "History of England" 
referred to, 401?;. 

Massinger, P.,362. 

Medmenham Al)bey, 72n, 141, 152. 

Melcombe, Lord, 23 ; his dispute with 
Lord Shelburne, 97. See Bubb Dod- 
ington. 

Meredith, Sir William, speech on par- 
liamentary privilege, 316/"; on the 
conflict of the Commons with the 
City, 335 ; rescues Lord North from 



INDEX. 



465 



the mob, 34 1 , 343 ; his amendment of 
Sir G. Savile's Act, 3G4//'; effect of 
Charles Fox's speech against, 3G7//'; 
move for inquiry into the Criminal 
Code, 373 ; presents petition of tlie 
Broad Church party, 3 Tit/"; on relig- 
ious tests, 383 ; complaint against Sir 
F. Norton, 444n. 

Merivale, Mr. Herman, 372n. 

Methodists, the. See Wesley, John ; 
Huntingdon, Countess of. 

Middlesex election, strategy of Wilkes's 
supporters, 152/f' ; riots, l^>i\ff', IG.";/'; 
enthusiasm in London, 1G3: govern- 
ment candidates, 1647i, 1G7 ; inefficien- 
cy of the constables, IGG; candida- 
ture of Colonel Luttrell, ICG^; pe- 
titions of the electors, 171/', 1S5h; 
hearing of petition in the Commons, 
niff; Luttrell's election confirmed, 
17G; ballads on, 177«, 178/;; ad- 
dresses of tlie electors to the king, 
17S«, 227 ; re-election of Wilkes, 
242?i ; political results of, 244. See 
Wilkes ; London ; Commons, House 
of. 

Midhurst borough and its voters, 126, 
150. 

Miller, Mr. (of the Evening Post), 
arrest of, 313; proceedings at the 
Mansion House, 314. 

Milton, Lord, 354k. 

Mnemon (another name of Junius), 3G0n, 
3Gln, 372h. See Junius ; Francis. 

Montagu, Viscount, pi'oprietor of the 
borougli of Midhurst, 12G, 150. 

Montague, Minister of William the 
Third, 4. 

More, Hannah, 385n. 

Morley, Mr. John, on Wilkism, 151n. 

Mountford, Lord, 416. 

Mulgrave, Lord, Fitzpatrick's verses on, 
291n. 

INIulgrave, Lady, mobbed by Eton boys, 
i2n. 

Murray, Attorney-general, IG/, 19, 21, 
93. See Mansfield, Lord. 

Nabobs. See Anglo-Indians. 

Nangis, Comte de, 53«. 

Napier, Lady Sarah, G, 48. See Len- 
nox, Lady Sarah. 

Napier,Sir William, and his brothers,48?2. 

Napoleon I., 57, 133, 175, 2Glw. 

Napoleon III., 2lGn, 278. 

Newcastle, Duke of, 9, 16, 10/, 21, 24, 
29, 107, 218n. 

30 



Newcome, Dr., Master of Hertford Col- 
lege, 49 ; his letters to Charles Fox, 
50, 5 In. 

New Shoreham. See Shoreham. 

Nice, 53«. 

Nonconformists, grievances of, 38.5/"; 
Bill for their relief, 387 ; the king's 
hostility to, 387/, 390 ; Belief Bill re- 
jected by House of Lords, 387 ; peti- 
tion against abolition of tests, 388 ; 
Lady Huntingdon's remonstrance, ib.; 
popularity of Charles Fox among, 389«. 

North, Lord Chief-justice, 226/;. 

North, Lord, 98, 110, 171, 189, 199, 214, 
223, 256, 296, 307/", 313, 334, 370, 
378/, 405, 413, 416, 434//; 443, 445/ 
449« ; becomes Chancellor of Ex- 
chequer, 122 ; instructions from the 
king in reference to Wilkes, 157/; 
consternation of his cabinet, 158 ; an- 
swer to Burke's speech in the Wilkes 
debate, 160«, IGl ; as prime-minister, 
212y"; wholesale purchase of parlia- 
mentary support by, 213 ; Lord Hol- 
land on, 212n ; further instructions 
from the king to, 214n, 387 ; destina- 
tion of the seals, 214 ; parries an awk- 
ward question, 220; on the City re- 
monsti"ance, 224/; discontent caused 
by his government, 228 ; his dread of 
Wilkes, 230 ; Junius on, 231/?'; in- 
cites opposition to Wilkes, 2'd7n ; his 
squabble with the City, 315 ; orders 
of the king to, 315, 403 ; difficult po- 
sition of, 318/ 321/ 343/; resolves 
to push the quarrel with the City, 
321/; advised by the king how to 
deal with the lord mayor, 325; buys 
the support of Wedderburn, 332 ; mal- 
treated by the mob, 340/; pathetic 
speech of, in the Commons, 341/; 
his civility to the Dissenters, 386/ 
387« ; opposes the Church Nullum 
Tempus Bill, 3d2Jf; on the Royal 
INIarriage Bill, 401/; his alarm at the 
desertion of Charles Fox, 405 ; op- 
poses repeal of Lord Hardwicke's 
Marriage Act, 428 ; efforts to recover 
Charles Fox's support, 435/; on the 
Rev. Mr. Home, 445 ; Charles Fox's 
opposition to, 449 ; his letter dismiss- 
ing Fox, 450. 

North Briton, No. 45, 143. 

Northington, Lord Chancellor, 82/ 92, 
121,416; his pensions, 93; his treach- 
ery to Lord Rockingham and advice 
to the king, 118/; in retirement, 123. 



4:6Q 



INDEX. 



NOR 

Northington, 2d Lord, 4lG, 425. 

Norton, Sir Fletcher (Speaker), 246 ; 
John Wheble's letter to, 811n, 312«; 
requests the sheriff's to quell the riot 
in Palace Yard, 342 ; hanged in effigy, 
346n ; Burke's sarcasm on, 402 ; as- 
sailed by Barre', ib.; Fox's attack on, 
407; accusations against, 444«. 

Norwich, Bishop of, preceptor of George 
III., 105. 

Oliver, Alderman, 314/, 326 ; his 
defiance of the House of Commons, 
337; trial of, 337^'; committal of, 
340, 344 ; in prison, 345/"; liberation 
of, 346. 

Onslow, Colonel George, 306, 313, 321 ; 
hanged in effigy, 346?;. 

Onslow, JNIr. George, 169, 300; on the 
revival of resolutions against the press, 
BOif; treats with the Presbyterians, 
387«. 

Orford, Lord, Henry Fox's attempt to 
bribe, 27/". 

Ossory, Lord, 248«, 253, 273, 283, 376, 
416, 434 ; Charles Fox's letter to, 
404/ 

Ossory, Lady, Walpole's letter to, 273. 

Oxford, price of the borough of, in 1768, 
125. 

Oxford, Bisho)) of, on the Eoyal Mar- 
riage Bill, 400k. 

Palet, Dr., 375. 

Palmerston, Lord, 415. 

Pampellone, Charles Fox's tutor, 40. 

Paoli, General, 133, 134w. 

Paris, English visitors in, 272/*; men 
of letters of, 275/ See France. 

Parkes, Mr. J., his memoir of Sir Philip 
Francis, 372w. 

Parliament in the last century, corrup- 
tion of, 1)3/". See Commons, House 
of; Lords, House of; Bribery. 

Parr, Dr., 375. 

Pay-office, accounts of, 30, 249, 250/?. 
See Fox, Henry. Holland, 1st Lord. 

Payne, Ralpli, 169. 

Pelham, Henry, Iff, 16«, 316. 

Pelham, Miss, 9. 

Percy, Lord, In, 3. 

Perreaus, the, 41."'/ 

Phipps, Captain, 291, 444?2. ,See Mul- 
grave. Lord. 

Pitt, W. (the elder), 16/ 19, 115, 117; 
political triumphs of, 20 ; Horace 
Walpole on, 20/; his ascendency in 



Parliament, 21 ; fall of, 23; increase 
of bis popularity in London, 30/"; as 
paymaster, 2oQ?i ; fame of his oratory 
in France, 274. See Chatham, Lord. 

Pitt, Thomas, Lord Chatham's advice 
to, 376 ; brilliant act of self-sacrifice, 
ib. 

Pitt, W. (the younger), 123«, 409«, 
411n. 

Pope, A., 148« ; the " Dunciad " on the 
grand tour, 55. 

Porson, Prof., on Pitt and Charles Fox, 
429. 

Portciiester, Lord. See Herbert, Henry. 

Porteus, Bishop of London, 385rt. 

Portland, Duke of, 115, 120, 308«, 356; 
his estate of Inglewood Forest claimed 
by Sir James Lowther, 359 ; sensa- 
tion created by the attempted spolia- 
tion of, 360 ; Sir G. Savile's Act in 
reference to. 362/; Sir W. ftleredith's 
amending bill, 364/; chivalrous care 
for his dependents. 365/; Fox's 
speech against, 36(;/, 367n ; result 
of the quarrel, 370/". 

Poulett, Lord, 354h. 

Pratt, Attorney-general, 204. 

Pratt, Judge of Common Pleas, 146. 

Premier's levees, 93. 

Presbyterians in 1768, 374, See Non- 
conformists. 

Press, discussions on the, in House of 
Commons, 291/; 304/, 307/ 437; 
in the House of Lords, 298/"; pro- 
ceedings of the deputy - sergeant 
against the, 305 ; reprimand of the 
printers, 309/; action of the City in 
behalf of the, 310; triumph of the, 
347. 

Price, U., 53; as an actor. 286. 

Priestley, Dr., 270, 374/", 375«, 378, 
386. 

Proctor, Sir W., in the hands of the 
mob, 153; "his Irish bullies at the 
Middlesex election, 164/". 

Provence, Comte de, 275. 

Pulteney, W. (Earl of Bath), his lamen- 
tation over his gambling losses, 77n. 

Purling, Mr., candidate for New Shore- 
ham, 349. 

QuEENSBERRY, Duke of, 75n, 278, 415. 

See March, Earl of. 
Quieting Acts, the, 361/ 

Radicals under George III., 440. 
Reynolds, Sir J., his picture of Charles 



INDEX. 



467 



Fox, 40 : of Lady Sai'ali Lennox, 
iG?i ; of Lady Waldegrave, 3'.)G ; his 
candidature for Plymptoii, 431 ; Sel- 
wyn's hon-mot on, 431«. 

Richmond, Duke of ( grandfatlier of 
Charles Fox), 8^', "."i. 

Richmond, Duke of, 115, iL'Ow, 19G, 
29S/, 400, 43'2n. 

Richmond, Duchess of, 8/'. 

Rigby, I'avmaster and Irish Secretary, 
30, 78/;"l23«, 132, IGO, 1G3, IGU, 181, 
19G, 'iir., 24G, 272, 30G, 3'Jlw ; urges 
Henry Fox to proscribe the Whigs, 
30 ; his advice to tiie city of London, 
ib. ; his defection from Lord Holland, 
32n, 36/; at Holland House, 35n ; as 
Irish Secretary and paymaster of the 
forces, G;")/'; Garrick's insinuation 
against, GG ; his Irish sinecures, 95 ; 
on the presentation of the iNIiddlesex 
petition to tiie king, 185«; his cam- 
paign against the Whigs, 187; his 
letter to the Duke of Newcastle, 2I8« ; 
reason for his opposition to the Gren- 
ville Bribery Act, 35271 ; his appear- 
ance in the House of Commons, 500. 

Roberts, Hugh, retnrningofficer for New 
Slioreham, 349, 350«. 

Robertson, Dr., his "Life of Charles V.," 
197k, 2G0. 

Robinson, Sir Thomas, 10. 

Rockingham, Lord, 29, 98, 115^, 
121/; 129, 181, 183, 203n, 345, 433«, 
434 ; administration of, 98 ; remon- 
strates with George ID., 110, 11872; 
invited by the king to assume the gov- 
ernment, 1 H!/; etfects of his admin- 
istration, 117; end of his government, 
119; retirement of his adherents, 
120?j, 121 ; his conference with the 
Duke of Bedford's followers, 122?2, 
123 ; his reconciliation with Chat- 
ham, 192; Lord Hardwicke's letter 
to, 20871 ; letter of Charles Fox to, 
28272. 

Rogers, Samuel, 212??, 3G477. 

Royal Marriage Bill in the House of 
Lords, 397^'; epigram on, 399;; ; in 
the House of Commons, 401^; pro- 
test against, ih. ; secrecy of the dis- 
cussions of, 404 ; final vote on, ib. ; 
ettect of Charles Fox's resignation on, 
405, 40G?2. 

Rudd, Mrs., 415, 417/7. 

Rumbold, Mr., candidate for New Shore- 
ham, 349/: 

Ruskin, Mr., his advice to an Italian 



artist, 58/! ; his criticisms on Homer, 
2G2«. 
Russell, Lord, his continuation of the 
"Memorials of Charles Fox," l7i ; his 
"Life of Charles Fox,'' 42/i. 

Sackville, Lord George, his duel with 
Governor Johnston, 301, 302?/. 

Sandwich, Lord, as an administrator, 
(j^f; scandals of his public and 
private life, (i8// ; contests the High- 
stewardship of Cambridge Universi- 
ty with Lord Hardwicke, 71.^'; made 
postmaster - general, 123; lines of 
Churchill on, 148/2 ; his chaplain, 
308?i ; other references to, 91?/, 92?/, 
132, 141, 143, 158, 195, 198, 201, 
215, 240, 449//, 450. 

Saunders, Admiral, letter of, to Lord 
Chatham, 112//. 

Savile, Sir George, 115, 120/2, 121»2, 
1 88, 304, 343, .3GG, 37G, 452 ; accuses 
the House of Commons of corruption, 
199/; his Nullum Tempns Bill, 3G272, 
363 ; his reply to Burke on clerical 
tests, 382. 

Sawbridge, Alderman, 18572, 224, 442. 

Scott, Sir Walter, on Holland House, 
37?2. 

Selwvn, G., 54, 55/2, G3, GG;/, lln, 78, 
81, 87, 208/2, 216/7, 273, 278, 415, 
420; Lord Carlisle's letters to, 54;/^", 
423/'; curiosities of his correspond- 
ence, 76//, 80// ; his daily roiuid of 
life, 87 ; official sinecures of, 94/"; 
price of his borough of Ludgersliall, 
125 ; his genealogical knowledge, 
271/; on Fox and Fitzpatrick, 289/'; 
in the hands of the mob, 336 ; his 
election troubles, 431/; on Sir Joshua 
Reynolds's candidature for Plympton, 
431/2; on Charles Fox's second loss 
of office, 451. 

Senior, Nassau, 21672. 

Seymour, Mr., on the persecution of the 
printers, 305. 

Shebbeare, Dr., 437/ 

Shelburne, Lord, 29, 31//, 121, 134, 201, 
224,292,332/2; his quarrel witli Hen- 
ry Fox, 31/; on Lord Holland's edu- 
cation of his children, 42?/ ; his polit- 
ical aspirations, 97 ; character of, 
131/7'; his American policy, 133; 
Dr. Johnson's anecdote of, 132?2; re- 
tirement of, 135; letter to Chatham, 
399/!, 400. 

Shelley, P. B.,50?2, 136,440. 



468 



INDEX. 



Sheridan, R. B., records of his wagers, 
417n. 

Shoreham, New, the election of 1770, 
34'.)#; the Christian Chib, 349; ef- 
fect of election in Parliament, 350/; 
disfrancliisemeut of the Christian 
Club, 352. 

Smith, Adam, 211, 273. 

Smith, Baron, Lord Holland's explana- 
tion to, 2507Z. 

Smith, Benjamin, intercepts a letter of 
Lord North's, 23 7w. 

Smollett, T., 211/?. 

Society, fashionable, in the early ysars 
of George III., gambling and low 
morality of, 77// 80/7"; drinking hab- 
its and gout, Sljf; absence of relig- 
ion in, 85 ; English and French, 271/, 
274/, 277/ 

Southey, R, 266. 

Stanhope, Lord, on Pitt tlie younger's 
overtures to the Whigs, 122?;, 123«. 

Stanhope, Mr., 125. 

Stanislaus, Augustus, of Poland, letter 
of, to Charles Yorke, 205. 

St. Anne's Hill, Charles Fox's residence, 
58, 267, 40i)«, 420. 

Stavordale, Lord, 80, 12G, 424. 

St. John, Henrj^, 273. 

Stone, Archbisho]), 82. 

Strange, Lord, 118, 163. 

Strangways, Lady Susan, 4.5/ 

Struensee, John Frederic, 3'J9n. 

Suftblk, Lady, 433. 

Sunderland, Lady, 6. 

Tankerville, Lady, drum -major of, 

GGn. 
Temple, Lord, 55k, 144n, ]60n, 162n, 

186, 191, 195k, 201, 405, 427. 
Tests, clerical, agitation against, 374/7"; 

debates on, in House of Commons, 

379_//. See Commons, House of; 

Lindsey, T. 
Thrale, Mrs., on Garrick and Wilkes, 

240. 
Thurlow. Solicitor - general, 173, 292, 

398, 400«, 407, 415. 
Tooke, Home. See Home, Rev. John. 
Tooke, Mr. William, his dispute with 

Mr. Tiiomas l)e Grey, 443/r, 447. 
Tories, Henry Fox as leader of the, 

27^; proscription of the Whigs by, 

29. See Fox, Henry ; Nortli, Lord ; 

Commons, House of, etc. 
Townshend, Alderman, ]8on, 224, 336, 

338, 443. 



Townshend, Charles, 12 f, 122n, 12'6n, 
127, 276, 408, 427; Henry Fox on, 
26w, 94n ; becomes Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, 121; death of, 122. 

Townshend, John, 49n. 

Townshend, Lady, her complaint of the 
royal family, 395/ 

Townshend, Lord, 434n. 

Townshend, Thomas, 164, 272, 402, 437. 

Treasury, epigram on the, 94n. 

Trecothick, Alderman, 224. 

Turner, Dr., 374n. 

Turner, Sir John, 304. 

Tyrone, Earl of, 273. 

Ulysses, another name of Junius, 370/ 
Unitarians in the Church of England, 
'Slijf; grievances of, 386/ See Non- 
conformists ; Dissenters ; Priestley, 
Dr., etc. 
Unwin, Mr., letter of Cowper to, 268«. 

Victoria, Queen, conditions of office 

under, compared witii those under 

George IIL, 89/f; 100/ 
Virgil, Charles Fox's admiration for, 263. 
Virginia. See American colonies. 
Voltaire, visits of Cimrles Fox to, 59n ; 

on religion in England, 85; on Wilkes, 

239n, 240n. 

Wakefield, Gilbert, 261??. 

Waldegrave, Lord, guardian of George 
in.'s childhood, 102??, 396, 397??. 

Waldegrave, Lady, married to the Duke 
of Gloucester, 396??. 

Walpole, Sir R., 7??, 27, 426, 429 ;' how 
he provided for his family, 88??, 89 ; 
fall of, 218??. 

Walpole, Sir Edward, 396. 

Walpole, Horace, his account of a fash- 
ionable ball, 7/; on Lord Bute's ad- 
ministration, 24?? ; receives a delicate 
offer from Henry Fox, 27/; on Hol- 
land House, 37?? ; on Lady Sarah Len- 
nox's beauty, 4(/; letters to Mann, 
64??, 68??, 74, 102??, 231, 427 ; on Lord 
Weymouth, 68 ; on the Earl of Sand- 
wich, 68/; letters to Conway, 70?? ; 
on gambling in the last century, 78, 
80; on Lord Cholmondeley's intem- 
perance, 82 ; his descri))tion of Wes- 
ley, 86??; his account of his own and 
his brother's sinecures, 88??, 89 ; on 
the death of George II., 102??; on 
Lord Rockingham's adlierents, 120??, 
121?? ; on Stephen and Charles Fox, 



INDEX. 



469 



170n, 175, 367 ; on Wilkes's popular- 
ity, 181, 239«, 2i0n ; on the Uiike of 
Bedford, 187/j ; on Kobertson's " Life 
of Charles V.," 197« ; on Charles Fox 
and Wedderburn, 2-i7n ; his migra- 
tions to France, '2"2n ; shopping com- 
missions in Paris, 273/"; letters to 
Lord and Lady Ossory, 273 ; on Da- 
vid Hume and his French admirers, 
27Gn ; his acquaintance with JNIme. 
du Deffimd, 280 ; gossip about Lord 
RLiyor Crosby, 314« ; on Wedder- 
burn's treachery, 334 ; on Sir J. Low- 
ther, 358 ; on the royal family, 395 ; 
on the marriage of the Uuke of 
Gloucester, 396, 397« ; his account 
of the gambling at Brooks's, 418?2; 
on things best worth finding, 419; on 
Charles Fox's debts, 423 ; on Charles 
J'ox and Wilkes, 42G ; as chronicler 
of Charles Fox's follies, 42(1/': his re- 
tirement from Parliament, 426 ; his 
objections to political life, 42 7/"; on 
Charles Fox's motion for repeal of 
Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act, 428 ; 
on Lord Clive, 436« ; other references, 
13, 17, 20/, 29, 48, 63, 121, 134«, 176, 
178, 4I6«, 41 7«. 

Warburton, Bishop (of Gloucester), his 
account of a morning at court, 8in. 
See Gloucester, Bishop of. 

Watson, Bishop, 95w, 379n, 385w, 431n. 

Wedderburn, A. (Lord Loughborough), 
on the Middlesex election, 173/, 247/; 
Lord Campbell on, 173n; dupes the 
Opposition, 185/; patriotic speeches 
of, 22r/; his historical precedents, 
226« ; early career of, 330/'; his fac- 
titious patriotism, 331/; Chatham's 
belief in, 332 ; is made solici tor-gen- 
eral, t6.: causes general astonishment, 
333 ; Churchill, Walpole, and Junius 
on, 333/; his treatment by the House 
of Commons, 334 ; his charges against 
tiie Opposition, 342/; liis quarrel with 
Charles Fox, 353/; on the Royal Mar- 
riage Bill, 400« ; minor references to, 
175, 185, 292, Sdln, 398, 407, 438/ 
447, 452. 

Wellington, Lord, 48. 

Wesley, John, described by Horace Wal- 
pole, 86?i; declaration of his follow- 
ers against Lindsey, 378 ; his Tory- 
ism, ib. ; referred to, 440n. 

Westminster, address of electors to the 
king, 227. 

Weymouth, Lord, his qualifications for 



the Irish Viceroyalty and as Secre- 
tary of State, 6(!/f ; Horace Walpole 
on, 67/'; other references to, 75, 123, 
158,160, 195,209,239. 

Wharton, Duke of, 148k. 

Whately, Mr., his letters in the Gren- 
ville papers, 42n, 65. 

Wheble, John, his letter to the House 
of Commons, 311«, 3I2n; arrest of, 
312 ; proceedings against the Speak- 
er's messenger, 345. 

Whigs, proscription of, by Henry Fox, 
2Sjf'; roused by the Middlesex elec- 
tion, 183/r; agitation begun by, 185; 
gathering at the Thatched House Tav- 
ern, 184 ; counter-proceedings of the 
ministers, 187; call for a dissolution 
of Parliament, 189 ; their success in 
the cities, ib. ; Chatham's esteem for, 
192; defection of Charles Yorke, 
201/; their demeanor during the 
quarrel of the city and Commons, 
296/, 337 ; treachery of Wedderbr.rn, 
332^; their zeal in the cause of or- 
der, 342 ; calumnies against, ib. ; vis- 
it the lord mayor in the Tower, 34.5/'; 
on the question of clerical tests, 376 ; 
their aft'ection for Charles Fox in later 
days, 434n. See Commons, House 
of; Rockingham, Lord. 

Whitaker, Sergeant, counsel against the 
Middlesex petition, 171, 172«. 

Whitehead, Paul, din. 

Wilkes, Mr. Israel, UOn. 

Wilkes, John, his description of Sir Fran- 
cis Dashwood, 26n ; on Alpine scen- 
ery, 55 ; on parliamentary bribery, 
] 25 ; Mr. Gladstone on, 140 ; his early 
life and domestic quarrels, 140/; his 
address to the Berwick freemen, 141/! ; 
purchases the borough of Aylesbury, 
ib. ; his profligacy, and cruel treat- 
ment of his wife, 141 ; becomes ob- 
noxious to the government, ii2Jf; 
his "Essav on Woman" and North 
Briton, 143; his duels, 143, 144; 
correspondence with the secretaries 
of state, 144n; deserted by his friends, 
ib. ; persecution of, 14.5/; goes into 
exile, 146n ; letter from France, 146 ; 
outlawed, and remains on the Conti- 
nent, 147/; becomes literary executor 
of Churchill, 148/; his failure in the 
attempt, 149/; narrative of his sufter- 
ings, 150; returns to England, and 
becomes candidate for the city of 
London, 151 ; enthusiasm of the'citi- 



470 



INDEX. 



zens for, 152; his candidatiire for 
Middlesex, 152^; proceedings of the 
judges against, l'>'> ; condemned to 
hne and imprisonment, ib. ; colhsion 
of his partisans witii the troops, ib.'; 
ingenious application of, to the House 
of Commons, 158; at the bar of the 
Commons, loS/*; Byron's lines on, 
1 59rt ; debate on proposed expulsion 
of, from the House, liJlJ/f ; his expul- 
sion voted, Kil , elected alderman, 
102; re-elected for Middlesex, 1G3; 
hostile vote of the House of Commons, 
163/; again re-elected for Middlesex, 
168; great debate on, in the Com- 
mons, IG!]^; his election for Middle- 
sex quashed, 171 ; ]ietition of his elec- 
tors, 171/"; general enthusiasm and 
testimonials of sympathy for, 178, 
179w; action against Lord Halifax, 
181 ; causes of his popularity, \S'2f; 
agitation of his partisans, 183^; his 
pamphlet against Lord Chatham, lOow; 
Chatiiam's defence of, ld(\ff'; debates 
in the Lords and Commons on,197_/7'; 
flattered by his admirers, 2Mn, 235« ; 
Junius's communications to, 235n; 
letter to the lord mayor, 235; limits 
of his ambition, ib. ; popular joy at 
his liberation from prison, 236, 237n, 
24:3 ; elected Sheriff and Lord Mayor 
of London, 237y; opjiosition of the 
court, 237h, 238 ; irksomeness of his 
civic duties, 238 ; becomes chamber- 
lain, ib. ; amusements of his leisure, 
239 ; complimented by Lord JNLans- 
field, 240 ; Walpole, Gibbon, and Vol- 
taire on his social qualities, 239n, 



240« ; his meeting with Johnson, 240; 
his death, and cliaracter of his work, 
240/'; annulment of the resolution of 
the Commons for his ex]Julsion, 243« ; 
on the condition of the press, 291 ; 
his leadership of the city in its cam- 
paign in behalf of the press, 311 ; his 
practical jokes on the House of Com- 
mons, 31 1«, 312«, 313; testimonial 
of the Common Council to, 34(1/; his 
quarrel with John Home, 44127"; mi- 
nor references to, 69, 70, 91«, 121,314, 
325, 345. 

Wilkes, Miss, 145, 146, 23G, 238, 239. 

Wilkes, Mrs. John, 141/f. 

Williams, Gilly, 79, 432. 

Williams, Sir Charles Hauhurv, 8, GGn. 

Wilmot, Sir Eardlev, 201/ 

Wilson, Dr., 185k. ' 

Winnington, Mr., 250«. 

Woodfall, editor of the Public Adver- 
tiser, trial of, 230; publishes sjieech 
of the Duk? ot Grafton, 297 ; letter 
of Charles Fox to, 371 ; at the bar 
of the House of Commons, 444/'; his 
discharge, 449. 

Wordsworth, sonnet of, on Lowther 
Castle, 357; treatment of his family 
by Lord Lonsdale, 357«. 

YoRKK, Charles, denounces Henry Fox, 
14; vacillation of, 201/, 202,"'203«; 
career and character of, 203^'; joint 
author of the "Athenian Letters," 
203« ; consents to become chancellor, 
206/; his remorse and death, 20Sjff\ 

Yorke, John, 208. 

Young, Arthur, 276«, 374. 



THE END. 



^RAWv'?9 



